Our Approach
Our Appropriate Intervention Plus Model (AIM+)
Our Appropriate Intervention Plus Model is a robust approach that incorporates ‘systems thinking’ disciplines to continually inform and transform the way we interconnect targeted outreach, intervention, and cognitive behavioural skills development for significantly reducing harm and create safety and stability in a young person’s life. It also innovatively interweaves our ‘transition into employability’ component, which combined makes for a more comprehensive system of interrelated interventions that truly equip young people to progress and maintain their personal, social and economic development – independent of us.
Drawing from our on-going overseas research and collaboration, together with our own remarkable three decades of international award-winning youth intervention in East London, in partnership with Impetus we are currently further refining and advancing our theory of change delivery model.
How We Do It
Our 3-Phase Change Programme
The young people we work with are experiencing and engaged in harm and don’t simply start by walking through our doors. Our Intervention Coaches go onto the streets to where young people hang out, and into the council estates where they live to build trust and relevance, or what we call, ‘building a relationship for change’. Even when a young person starts to engage our programme, there will inevitably be several setbacks and relapses on the part of our young clients that staff need to support them to address. Our programme is not a quick fix. We are in it with a young person’s change journey for the long haul, which is why our intervention and coaching programme is designed and delivered in 3-Phases across two years.
Follow-up
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Our Employability Progression element of our intervention programme is developed around a young person’s readiness and ability to engage and transition into employment and professional adult working environments. We are Not a recruiter that simply tries to find any jobs for young people. We coach our young clients to be true and honest about their current realities and skills sets, set an ambition for their career future and then coach them to work with all the challenges and tensions that come with equipping and enabling them to be “employ-able” for their specific job or career of their choice. We don't simply refer a young person on in this context! Our Intervention Coaches and Employability Practitioners accompany our young clients in this journey, enabling them to be open to further learning and more able to maintain and self sustain employment with confidence and resilience.
Our Employability Intervention Coaches (EIC’s) deliver services that support participants to build aspiration, motivation and self-confidence for strengthening key employability skills that are also transferable for work and their lived environment.
We have an additional third-year post programme follow-up to ensure successfully exited young people are maintaining their change one-year after finishing our programme.
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The Lifestyle Change element of our intervention programme utilising strategic outreach and street intervention and cognitive behavioural skills development is an essential component and thread that runs through everything we are and do at Streets of Growth. It is relentlessly engaged from a young client’s pre-entry into our programme through to their successful exit with us - including when they relapse again and again. Unlike in other organisations who do this work, at Streets of Growth this is not a 'detached’ part of our work, it is central! We strategically target and go to the very point of our young clients' need and context, which can occur before, during and long after any engagement they may have in our building or our wider programming. This highly complex and often controversial Lifestyle Change element of our programme is not easy, very time and resource absorbing, extremely challenging but vital and developmental. When first trying to build connection and trust with harder to engage young people in their neighbourhoods, our frontline team often face resistance, reluctance, suspicion and hostility. This is the hard reality of this work and where Streets of Growth implement our model of approach to breakthrough and overcome initial resistance to initiate what we term as building a “A Relationship for Change This is the gateway for initiating, engaging and maintaining a young person’s journey of change process with us.
We really get and understand that it is not easy for a young person to try and change whilst still living in neighbourhoods where their peers may still be involved in criminal harm. This is why our Lifestyle Change element factors in a young person’s lived environment so they are safer on the streets and on their council estates where they can more positively socialise, live and work. Building trust to engage the contexts in which young people live and hang out is crucial. This includes improving the way young communities are included and actively involved in the community development and regeneration opportunities in their neighbourhoods and borough. Another example is young people being supported to run and take part in events in their communities that give them a voice and presence and that nurture wider community cohesion and safety.
Trauma-Informed Practice:
Healing from Trauma is a profound and non-linear process, marked by both progress and setbacks. We provide practical strategies to reignite self-belief, hope and effort throughout a young person’s change journey with us.
Relapse:
Relapse setbacks are actually part and parcel of anyone’s change process and a completely natural and often common occurrence for people that are also taking on the difficult task of working through trauma. Setbacks, while discouraging, are not necessarily indications of failure but reminders that growth and healing is occurring. We coach young people to understand that no matter how challenging the setback and how many they may have with us, setbacks can be viewed as opportunities for immense learning and resilience.