Working with the community: Love Barrow Families

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults.  

[Introduction to Barrow] 

Julie: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Julie, an associate as Research in Practice and today I'm talking to Trina Robson, who is one of the directors of Love Barrow Families, and this is a project that's really close to my heart as it's based in the area where I grew up and I lived until I was in my twenties. So, hello and welcome, Trina, really glad to have you here.  

Trina: Hi, thank you, I'm pleased to be here.  

Julie: Yes. Great. So, I wonder if you could start by giving a little bit of context around Barrow-in-Furness and how Love Barrow Families started.  

Trina: So, I guess one of things that I've been thinking quite a lot about recently is the significance of myself being Barrovian. So, I was born in Barrow, brought up in Barrow, and so I've been a social worker for many years and when we started Love Barrow Families, one of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that we built on what was already here. So, in Barrow, there is a very strong sense of belonging, still. We have a football team that are doing really well at the moment and have a really big following, and people here tend to be very proud, and they're good people, and I think as I've travelled around, particularly with Love Barrow Families, I've discovered that not everywhere is like that. So, it feels quite important to highlight it at the beginning. So, Barrow-in-Furness, is a largely white, I think it's something like a 90-odd% white population, population of around 70,000. We're on the North-west, North-western top of Morecambe Bay. We have a history of ship building and steel works in the town, things over the years have really changed so whereas once upon a time nearly everybody was employed by Vickers, Vickers is now BAE and there's a lot of contractors in BAE now so Barrow's changed quite considerably. We have a lot of people coming in from outside and we have a number of hotels that have sprung up all over the town which has not really been known before. So, we've got a big Holiday Inn in the middle of the town centre, Premier Inn, and they're booked up by the people who work in BAE. So, for people who come from Barrow, it's quite different to how it used to be.  

We often hit the news for things that are not very helpful, so drug addiction has been one of those, we hit the national news around the figures of drug addiction and drug dealing in Barrow, the figures for child protection, children looked after, child in need are all high, I suppose like many Northern working-class towns, we struggle. The town centre doesn't exist in the way that it did once upon a time, so that sense that I grew up with of people coming together is not really there now and it feels like one of the things that's happened over the last few years is that people want to come in and fix us, and do things to us, and build community, and I feel quite strongly as a Barrovian, and I know there's lots of other people who do as well, that we know what the answers are already, we've got them, and it's not a case of somebody teaching them, it's a case of allowing them to be there and trusting the people in Barrow to know how to look after each other. Yes.   

[Starting Love barrow Families] 

Julie: Yes, that's a really good introduction to the area and it sounds like it's changed quite a lot since I lived in the area, so that's quite interesting for me, personally. So, given that context, when and how did you start up Love Barrow Families and what was the impetus behind that?  

Trina: So, when I reflect back, I think that the early years, the time when I was a social worker, when I was young, in my twenties, had quite a profound effect on me. So, people like Bob Holman who was a community worker who worked on the Easter House estate in Glasgow, a very poor estate, and he lived there and worked there. So, it was what we would now call a community-based social work model, I guess. Well, I remember those things and they were the things that influenced me right in the beginning. So, I knew that existed and I knew that old or… so, when Love Barrow Families, it was 2013-14, I was working at the time in the child and adolescent mental health service, I'd worked previously in social services. We'd had a number of serious case reviews, there was really high anxiety around risk, there were local professionals from CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services), and from social services who had been blamed and shamed in the local paper for things going wrong. It felt like the services were really fragmented and they tightened thresholds as well, so there were families bouncing between mental health services and child protection, lots of disagreement about who should pick it up and what should happen.  

So, that, and alongside that, I was having some personal experiences, which again have been important and they feel important to talk about, because I was a foster parent a long time ago and I was involved with adult mental health services because in my role as supporting the woman that, I'd fostered when I was younger and I was looking after her daughter, and it was a really powerful, difficult environment to be in and I just started thinking about whether there was a possibility to do something different. There was lots of discussion at the time around innovation. I worked for a health trust and one of the directors in the health trust was a GP (General Practitioner) who had done lots of community work, and there were some bursaries. There was a possibility of applying for bursaries, to what they were calling innovation, innovation bursaries, and so I talked to John, John Howarth, and he supported the idea of working with some families locally to try and find out from them what their views were, what they thought would work, what wouldn't, and then trying to pull that together into some kind of plan that we could use to reorganise. It was really reorganising public services, that's what we were talking about at the time and one of the things we did was, we really wanted to make sure that what we did was backed up with evidence and theory, and in some ways it was kind of a lifetime's work, but one of the things we did was we used the New Economic Foundation's definition of co-production to inform what we were doing and I'm really pleased, looking back, that we did that because I think co-production, because one of those words that was banded around a lot and used in different ways, but for us we were very clear about what it meant and there was a very strong sense of it being about equality and valuing what people do as work. So, asset-based, really, valuing people's assets. So, yes.  

Julie: That's really interesting. If I could just come in and ask about the co-production, so how did you do that, then, to make sure that you were really engaging with the community?  

Trina: So, because I've worked a long time in Barrow, and I have a number of colleagues who have also got good relationships with me and have worked in Barrow for years, we decided, well, A) we would ask seven families. Seven families who, at the time everyone was talking about complex families, that was the kind of label that was being used. So, we just, myself and my colleagues, approached seven families who had all had different experiences of services. So, we had, one of them was a foster family, we had a couple of families who had been really heavily involved with mental health services and adult mental health, and children had diagnoses and things, and we had families who had children taken away, families whose children were on the child protection register. So, we tried to get a real, kind of, spread. We facilitated, myself and my colleague, Alison Toobey, we facilitated three meetings with the group of families and three meetings with a group of colleagues from all the different agencies that worked with families and we asked them to think about, essentially, what were their top five areas? What were the top five things that we should focus on? And then we brought them together for two sessions and involved some of the senior managers, some of the directors from health to support that, and then we wrote a plan. We wrote a plan of what we wanted to do, and there were five principles. So, one was a reorganisation of mainstream services. These were all things that families had highlighted. So, a reorganisation of mainstream services so that we co-located what we called at the time a wrap-around team in the town centre. It's interesting, the language, because I've always felt that health and social care are very different ways of describing the same thing and wrap around was, I suppose it's a bit like the idea of a think family, the think family agenda was around at the time as well.  

[The approach at Love Barrow Families] 

So, yes, so reorganisation of mainstream services to have an actual team, so not a virtual team, a real team, co-located in the middle of the town centre and that would include everything, really, social work, adult mental health, child mental health, whatever was needed and one assessment, so families often say, don't they, that they really get tired of telling a story over and over again to different people, and often it's quite an emotive story to tell, has an impact on people and, again, because I'd worked in social services and I'd worked in health, I was aware that most assessments that are used cover similar things. They might use different language but they're looking at similar things. So, we worked together as a team, we had an adult psychiatrist from adult mental health who was helping us and we just looked at all the different assessments. So, when somebody comes into a service, what are the questions that are asked? And we brought them all together into one document so that we could just use it as one assessment, and the other thing that we really wanted to do was use, well, we use the DMM (Dynamic Maturation Model), so we used Pat Crittenden's work to assess adults, using the adult attachment interview, and children using the school-age assessment which myself and my colleague were both trained in, and the reason we chose Pat Crittenden's work was we felt really strongly that we needed to understand, really understand what was going on for families and for parents when they came to the attention of statutory services, and the adult attachment interview in particular is, I don't know of anything better in terms of, it's an empathic process and it gives people an opportunity to talk about their lives, and it identifies the particular things that are causing trouble.  

So, a lot of the families that I worked with when I was in CAMHS there would be a suggestion that parents went for counselling, or even in child protection, in care proceedings, and I always used to think, 'But what are they going into counselling for?' And I like the AAI (Adult Attachment Interview) because it focusses on the particular things that parents are having trouble with, not everything, because we're all on that continuum somewhere. So, it helps to highlight things that sometimes are not evident to the person, and it's usually around unresolved trauma and loss. So, the Dynamic Maturational Model, the attachment assessments, were a really important tool for us. We also, I'm just going back to the principles, assets and skills, we really wanted to build on what was already here in Barrow. So, for example, our first office, we were given it free of charge in a local school and we just, somebody came and put some work surfaces up for us around the edge of the room so we could use our laptops and computers, and we had a really big, old table, wooden table in the middle of the room and we just did everything in that room. Parents, when they came and dropped their kids off, they would come up the stairs and meet with us, we held the co-group meetings, we more or less did everything, really, from that one room. Yes, so assets and skills, and we wanted to make sure that we focused on the assets, and skills, and strengths that families brought, not just the problems, because some of the families that we worked with, particularly in the early days, that's what they'd been used to.  

They'd been used to people focusing on the things that they didn't do very well and one of the things I learned, again through the adult attachment interview, really, is that it's as important if not more important to look for the gems, the little bits of magic dust that are in everybody's histories. You know, everybody has some experiences of love and even if they're tiny, and it's just as important to find those and bring those to people's attention and have them acknowledged as it is to look at the problems. So, assets were really important and also, the other thing was about trying to help people to build capabilities. So, there's a guy called Sen who developed something called the Capabilities Framework that's been used quite a lot in community development, and I didn't know about it when we first started Love Barrow Families but I've thought about it quite a lot since, and it's about helping people to develop capabilities but it's also recognising that we don't all have what we need in order to be able to do the things that we want to do. So, if you can't afford a pair of trainers, you can't go running if you want to run, those kinds of things, and so we wanted to make sure that we were paying attention to all of those things, particularly for parents so that we could build step by step, we could build them step by step to get to where they wanted to be, really, and we called it at the time the Zone of Proximal Development, Child Development Term.  

So it's very much like how children, when they're small, parents stretch them to the next little task that they can achieve so like when they're… but not too far, and what we found in Love Barrow Families in the early days was when we were sent people, like we had somebody from the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) who used to come in and advise, and set things up for parents, it was often out of their Zone of Proximal Development. So, they might go for an interview for a training course and they just came back deflated because it was too much, it was overwhelming. So, that's been a really important learning for us and particularly in part because some of the parents that we worked with initially are now working for us, and that's, I think that's been the key. Well, it's still the key, that it is always trying to just stay within that zone that people can manage but allow them to push a little bit further as well.  

[Building on people’s strengths and capabilities] 

Julie: So, what kinds of things did you include in that building capabilities? What kind of work did you do with the families to do that?  

Trina: So, when we first started, we weren't very good at it, to be honest, we kind of missed it because, well, myself and Alison had come from a social work background, so although we wanted to focus on assets, we forgot to ask the questions in the assessments right at the beginning. We eventually went back and started to ask parents, right at the very beginning in child protection, case conferences, wherever, whatever meetings we were in, what they were interested in, what their aspirations were, and it was amazing what people said. So, we had one mum who, she was trying to get her child back, returned to her after being in care, he did come back to her but she was interested in archaeology, and she'd never told anybody that, and we have a couple of projects locally that do stuff that meant that she could go and explore a little bit and try and find out what it is that she was interested in particular. So that, we have a member of staff now who, when she first came to us, one of her children was in care, children were on the child protection register, she'd been in care herself, she's got a five-year plan at the moment to become a child and family support worker. So, she currently works for Love Barrow Families as a kind of front of house, welcoming people, and because she's been through the service she's very well able to offer people what she had, because she knows what it felt like.  

Julie: And it kind of shows a gradual gaining in confidence, I guess, for people, instead of being seen as a deficit and lacking in skills, they're building their own skills which in turn can help to improve their company, so that seems very valuable.  

Trina: I think one of the things that's happening, I know we're going to talk a bit about Love Barrow Together, but one of the things that's happening with Love Barrow Together, which has kind of grown out of Love Barrow Families, is that as a borough council we're looking at trying to do things differently and one of the things that I've done with Love Barrow Families over the years is used small amounts of funding to help people to take that next step, and it's amazing, really, what can happen because we spend so much money on services and trying to be helpful to people and yet if we try to do things a little bit differently, it costs a lot less and the outcomes are just amazing, you know, just getting it right. Like I said, at the moment that somebody needs it, you know, we have a dad who is about to do some asset-based community development training and we've paid for him to do that, so it's trying to just find those things. It's difficult, really, because it's very individual. It's very much tailored to each person. What works for one person doesn't work for the other, but the outcomes are amazing for families who don't normally, A), do very well, or B), get a very good service.  

Julie: And that access to funds at a very early stage is obviously very beneficial because it saves a lot of money further downstream.  

Trina: Yes, it does, and most people, they don't have money, you know? Like, those of us who work, I mean I'm not rich by any means but I can do more or less what I want to do. You know, some other families, in Barrow at the moment, poverty-wise, people, £200 to somebody can enable them to set up a little business, you know? It can completely change somebody's life.  

Julie: Yes, yes, that's great. So, I've lost where we are now with the top five things.  

Trina: I think I've more or less said everything that I wanted to say. The one thing I didn't say was that when we met with the original two groups, the practitioner's group were very insistent that we needed qualified, experienced, safe hands to hold the team. If we were going to do things differently within an environment that was anxiety-driven, we all knew it was going to be difficult and the people in the team needed to feel that they were in safe hands. So, that's always been something that we had people like me, Alison, we had a really good family therapist who had had lots of experience, who would do the supervision but do lots of things, really, but one of them is to try and make sure that the theory is brought into practice day to day. So, trying to translate some of the information from the assessments into, so what does that mean when a volunteer is going to help them with the washing or something? So, very much trying to use the assessments practically as well as psychologically.  

Julie: So, if I understand it, then, what you're saying is you have this core team with some background in the theory and the practice, but then you have a core group of volunteers as well who work with the community, is that right?  

Trina: Yes, so many of our parents and families volunteer do various things. I wouldn't even call it volunteering, really, it's assets. It's sharing assets with each other and when we first started we called it a time bank, we don't use that same terminology now, but the idea that one person has a skill that they can share and help someone, and another person can repay that with their skills. So, the time bank is just a way of logging all of that and then, so we have a dad who's really good at practical tasks, so decorating, he'll go and decorate somebody's house, an then if he needs a little bit of help with benefits or something, somebody else will help him with that. So, it is volunteering but I think volunteering also sticks a label on it that professionalises it, and what I think is important about Barrow is what I said at the beginning, really. We know how to do this, we know how to be good neighbours to each other, and what the services need to do is trust that and allow people to do it.  

Julie: I like that, good neighbours and sharing what your skills are with other people who need your help with something and then getting something in return and that seems like a really, really good model and very worthwhile.  

[Outro] 

Thanks for listening to this Research in Practice Podcast. We hope you've enjoyed it. Why not share with your colleagues and let us know your thoughts on Twitter? Tweet us at @ResearchIP.  

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence informed practice with children and families, young people and adults.  

[How Love barrow families changed over time] 

Julie: Okay, so you started off Love Barrow Families, how did it evolve over time?  

Trina: So, we took 20 families initially and we worked with those families for, so we started in 2014, we had an evaluation in 2016, the end of 2016. Northumbria University did an independent evaluation for us and that evidenced a number of really positive outcomes, some of which surprised us. So, things like a reduction in what they called contact in health in CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services), and in adult mental health less out of hours calls, less GP contacts, and then the things like reduction in child protection. The child protection numbers, although we only had 20 families, I think we started off with, I think it was something like 21, 22 children on the child protection register, and 16, 17 of those came off with a safeguarding plan they call it now, don't they. We had children returning home and staying at home, we had a dad who had been in prison for years, in and out of prison for most of his life and has now not been in prison for about 6 years, I think, in total, so things like that.  

But, also, the evaluation worked with some of the families, and the families were very keen to say that what made the difference to them was the sense of belonging, that they almost regarded Love Barrow Families as family, as extended family. And, that meant that led to all sorts of things that they could do and changes that happened, that we would not really have focused on at the beginning. So, yes, that sense of belonging and trust, and the other thing is, I called it true core production but a couple of parents said to us in the early days they knew that they could trust because when they looked into… well one of the mums said to me, 'When I look into your eyes and you look back at me, I see that I'm equal to you and you don't think you're any different to me,' and that's quite a difficult thing isn't it, to measure or to evidence. But, I think when we talk about magic dust which is what we've talked about a lot over the years with Love Barrow Families in various presentations and things that we've done, I think that's probably it, that is the magic dust and it's a person-to-person thing as much as it is a theory or a way of working.  

Julie: That's obviously really important, especially as from what I understand from your talking here, is that it was part of the statutory service, they were on a child protection plan.  

Trina: Yes, yes, so one of the things that I didn't say earlier, that I probably should of done, is that the families, the original group of families that helped us to design Love Barrow Families, said that they didn't want to be passed from one organisation to another and they didn't want to have to live in fear of children being taken away, that was one of things, that was their words, really. So, we thought quite a lot about what that meant and talked to the families about what that meant, and really what it meant was they wanted honesty and clarity about what social workers were saying to them that needed to change. They wanted to be able to be involved in that, and make some decisions for themselves about what they focused on first, you know, to do things step-by-step. We had an agreement with the local authority that the social worker in our team, so my colleague Alison Tooby, the lead social worker, she helped child protection cases, so that was one of the differences between us and some of the other Troubled Families, because some of our funding came from Troubled Families. That was one of our differences was that our local authority at the time supported us to be able to do everything, including child protection, so we didn't have to hand those families back to somebody else when a concern came up, it stayed within our team.  

[Becoming a community interest company] 

Julie: And, is that still part of your work, or has that changed?  

Trina: Yes, so that changed. So, after the evaluation at the end of 2016 it became evident that the funding that was being used really to support, to fund my post and my colleagues post as the lead social worker, so the funding that we had from the local authority and from health was no longer available. I had a choice about whether I left Love Barrow Families and went back into health, or whether we tried to do something different. What we decided to do was set up as a community interest company, so that's what we did in order to keep going. So, from 2017 we are Love Barrow Families Community Interest Company, and that's been a huge learning curve. What it's meant is that we have had to seek our own funding to keep going, so for the first year with Alison, we had one salary and we shared it between us. And then, as we learned the rules and we learned how to approach funders and write applications and present what we were doing, we managed to get funding through other members of the team, so the team is quite a well-established, well-funded team, but it is a community interest company, so we no longer do the local authority work that we did. We still work with families, but the families that we work with have a social worker from the local authority.  

Julie: And, how secure is that funding?  

Trina: I don't think anybody can ever say that it's secure, but it's a whole new world. So, most of our funding we get for either two or three years so we know we are fairly safe for the next, probably, three years. But, within that timescale, obviously it's the same for any charity or community interest company, you are constantly looking at the future.  

Julie: And, so how did the work that you do with families change, when you became community interest group? When you were funded by community interest group?  

Trina: Yes, I think it was already changing, because we were learning much more about the community side even before we became a community interest company, so the time back, you know all those things I was talking about, we were already focusing on those things a bit more, building capabilities. So, the focus had changed, slightly, but when we became a community interest company we went back and looked at our original mission and our values, and we invited… one of the things we've done over the years is had events where everybody comes together so all the families come in and all the staff come in and we look at what we've been doing and what's working and what needs to change.  

So, we rewrote our mission, and we rewrote, well we call them our ingredients, and the ingredients are having an open front door, so that's different. It's about trying to react, respond to whatever comes through the front door, so if it's a request for food we can look at that, if it's somebody that's in care proceedings and wanting some support we will do that, so whatever comes through the front door, so an open front door. Trying to get things right first time for people, so that's very much about using the skills and the experience that we have in the assessments, we still use the Dynamic Maturational Model of attachment to try and understand, like I said before, and make sure that whatever we do, it's what needed. Because, I think sometimes, as professionals, we do lots of stuff and we don't know whether it's what needed or what's helpful. So, an open front door, getting it right first time, build it and they will come, so the idea of families wanting to come rather than being referred, so almost like an alternative service, really. And then, active citizenship, so that's very much about building on what I was saying before really, about trying to help people to take the next little step and get to where they want to get to. And, also, I guess, I think, it feels like the families are starting to lead much more, running Love Barrow Families, you know, the families who are employed and the families who are… we have a project board that families are involved in, their voices are really quite at the forefront of everything we do now.  

Julie: That's interesting, so, in what ways have you taken on board the views of the families to move the service forward?  

Trina: That was, when we became a CIC, a community interest company, we went back and looked at what we were doing, they are all things that the families had told us really. The getting it right first time I think maybe is more to do with us as professionals, knowing that we need a really solid, sort of, framework behind us, theoretical framework to understand, because it's quite complicated, life is complicated, isn't it? Trying to work out how to help. But the other things, the open front door, build it and they will come, the active citizenship, they are all things that families have taught us, really.  

Julie: And, do you find that you get a lot of families with having an open front door policy?  

Trina: Yes.  

[How people are supported] 

Julie: Lots of families coming to you? And, what, kind of, I mean a typical day won't be the same everyday, but what are some examples of things that people walk in your front door for?  

Trina: I mean, obviously it's different now because of COVID, so, you know, but before COVID, we seemed to get a number of people who were struggling because they were in care proceedings and they were struggling emotionally with care proceedings and I think we probably got a reputation for being able to listen to people and support people, emotionally. So, we don't intervene in care proceedings, you know, obviously we don't hold that role anymore, but when I was a social worker, when I was young social worker, we supported parents even if children were being removed, you know, and some of the case conferences that I've been to over the last few years, that empathy and that understanding seems to be missing. And I think it is possible to be in a really difficult situation with a parent who is losing their children, and yet be able to allow them to cry and to be angry and upset. So, it's interesting because I think it is a reputation that we've got with other families out there that are telling families, 'Look, you know, you can go and have a cup of tea and people will listen to you, and will help you to understand,' because it's quite a complicated process, care proceedings, people don't always know what it's all about, so people come for that reason. We do a number of activities for children and young people, that seems to have caught on, families come and either ring or just come and ask if it's possible to join in, in those things. We have fair share food, every week, so people come and ask for food. We've been doing… I know we are going to talk about COVID a little bit, but during COVID there's been a bank of volunteers that have been cooking meals and delivering a nice cooked meal and a proper activity, family activity, for families every week over the last few months.  

Julie: So, do you have a space there, then? Where people can come, they can sit down, it's a nice environment for them, they can have a cup of tea, they can have something to eat? I'm trying to get a sense of what the layout…  

Trina: Yes, so when we first started, like I said, it was more, kind of, office based, and we used other people's venues. Then we got our own building which was in the middle of the town centre, and it was an old neighbourhood management building. It had a room downstairs that you just walked into, it used to be a jewellers years ago, so it's like a shop front. And, it was a really big room that we just got two settees, we bought two second hand settees and we had a kettle and whatever, and it worked really well that people could just come in and chat, and then we also had offices upstairs that could be used for the assessments and, you know, the more in-depth work, I guess. But, we did loads of things in that big room, we had Christmas parties in there, we had Halloween activities with all the children, we even did like an animal handling event where we had a lady came and brought various little animals that she was teaching the children about, so it was very accessible, that was really accessible.  

The building that we are in now, we moved out of that building because it was shared with another project and we, kind of, outgrew it. We are in a house now, it's the old Firemaster’s house in Barrow, and again we've kept that, although it's not as big and we have a front door, right, you know, you don't just walk into it, we've kept a room very similar. So, there's a table with chairs around it because that's what people find that they want, one of our team, Diane, who's at front of house, she and Dean who's a community champion, they are both employed, they, kind of, look after people, bring them in, make them a cup of tea, and if they can't help then they will come and find somebody else who can.  

Julie: Interesting. So, people can come to you, what about any work that you do out in the community? Is there any examples of that kind of work?  

Trina: We've done a lot of work over the years in partnership with other services, so the food delivery project that we've just done… they are the people that we used to share our old building with, they are set up by two people that struggled with addiction themselves, so it's an abstinence-based addiction project locally. And also Drop Zone who are youth project, so we worked with them to make the meals and deliver the meals. We have really close relationships with, there's a number of organisations in Barrow, statutory and third sector, who know each other really well and who have a similar, kind of, ethos. So, there's another project called The Birchall Trust who were set up to work with families where there has been sexual abuse, so we did things with them like where I would go and do some training for them, for their counsellors, attachment training, free of charge, and they would allow us to use their rooms when we needed to, free of charge. I don't know if that answers your question?  

[Theoretical underpinning and ethos of Love Barrow Families] 

Julie: Yes, it does, yes it does. So, you've already talked about the work of Pat Crittenden and that dynamic maturational model and the adult attachment interview, are there any other underpinning ethos that informs the kind of work you do from a theoretical perspective?  

Trina: Yes, so the Love Barrow Together work that has, kind of, grown out of Love Barrow Families is really exciting. We are using the similar, kind of, values, ethos, to try and spread the way of working more widely. So, we are trying to develop values and behaviour framework around things like love, equality, equity, understanding, those things, and we've just started to talk about how we could almost train everybody, right across the board, in some of the things that we are thinking about and this idea of an open front door. So, that if somebody turns up at housing but they've got a need that's not to do with housing, they don't get turned away, so the ethos is very much there. I think we've moved even more into thinking about community development and one of the people that's helping us, working with us, we've got some really good people working with us, so Cormac Russell has done a lot of work in asset based community development and he is working with us in Love Barrow Together to try and help people to hear the voices of the residents more than anything, and to design what we do around what they are telling us, and that's not quite as straight forward as it sounds. Because, I think one of the things that we have to do is if we really want to listen to people's voices then we have to hear what they have to say even when we don't like it, and do something about it. Cormac's model is quite key at the minute, and he has just written a book that we are going to be using actually as a basis for some discussions, Rekindling Democracy, I think that's just been published this year. One of Pat Crittenden's books actually that's really helpful is Raising Parents, that's a really lovely book, but Pat Crittenden also has a really good website that she's got lots of information on as well, and she travels, well she doesn't at the minute, but she has travelled the world, she's travelling through Zoom I think, at the moment, teaching people.  

So, we are hoping to train some people using Pat Crittenden's work as well, and the other person who's working particularly with the borough council is Hilary Cottam, and Hilary has done a lot of work innovating, she did some really good work in Wigan. She's also got a book that seems to be creating a bit of a storm and that's called Radical Help. Hilary's involved in supporting our CEO for the borough council, and some of her work is around trying to influence the statutory services, the senior managers and to try and work together to things differently in Barrow. Because children's services is run by Cumbria County Council, so we have a county council but there is Barrow Borough Council and what we are trying to do… is a borough council, we take responsibility for our own children who live here, you know, up to now we've been quite good I think at working together in terms of housing and those kinds of things, there's a lot of good work happened, particularly because of COVID. But, it's difficult because children protection and child in need and all the children services side of things, that's the county council, so it's always felt a bit tricky. But, what we are trying to do and what Hilary is supporting Sam to do is to bring some of that together, so the county council can support us and work with us in Barrow as a borough council to do things differently, so it's watch this space really as to what we can manage to do, but it feels quite an exciting time to be in.  

[Work during the pandemic] 

Julie: Yes, that is what I was just thinking, how exciting that is with all the changes, yes. Obviously, got to rear its ugly head is COVID-19, and obviously you had quite a strong place in the community before the pandemic but I was just wondering how that helped during the pandemic and, you know, what has happened during that time, subsequent to that time and likely in the future, as well?  

Trina: Yes, it's been difficult, it would be wrong to say it hasn't because, I think, the sense of belonging that people got from the building, clearly that isn't there in terms of being able to physically come in. But, we have done things like we've got a WhatsApp parents groups that's worked absolutely brilliantly well, it's such a simple thing but families have just been able to stay in touch with each other, and sometimes it's just talking about where we can get a nice Chinese from or something like that, you know, it's not anything other than just touching base. And we've done things like, we've done a sing-a-long with a local artist performer, we're not doing it now but we did it during COVID, one of the new mums that came along really liked singing so she used to sing to us all, so at the end of the sing-a-long she would lead and sing, and she's done it at some the activities, the events, that we've had outside, as well. So, that's been another really good way of, I suppose, supporting people, it's been nice of that mum to be able to do it and it's helped her, and it's been lovely for other people to hear her singing, as well.  

Yes, we've all had to learn fast, haven't we, with COVID? We've tried to do as much as we can virtually, we've had summer events outside that have worked really well, where people have been able to come together socially distanced. And, we've been lucky, I haven't mentioned this before and I should have done really, The Lankelly Chase Foundation have been really supportive of us over the years and they've really helped over this period of time, as well. We've had some funding through the Hardship Fund through the council and through a local funder, Cumbria Community Foundation. So, Cumbria Community Foundation gave us the money to be able to cook, to support the volunteers to cook and deliver a meal to, I think it was 120 families every week for about four months. The idea of that was, it wasn't really just about the food, it was about, you alright?  

Julie: Yes.  

Trina: About people feeling like they were connected to one another and that somebody cared about them. You know, we have a number of single people who struggle and come to us, you know, that were really finding life difficult and being able to look forward to Greg, the delivery man, coming with a smile and a chat and the food has been really important, you know, for them, it's quite significant. So, trying to keep our values, but find different ways of conveying them, I guess.  

[Learning from the work during the pandemic] 

Julie: Yes, and is there anything that you're likely to take forward from what you've learnt during COVID? Or, is it work that you were already doing anyway?  

Trina: I think food, the thing about food we will take forward, so we've got a big freezer in Love Barrow Families and although we're not, we haven't had the, the funding has stopped now to fund the actual cooking project. We have got enough funding to be able to cook some meals and freeze them so that families can just come and pick them up when they need them, because as I've said before, there's a lot of families who they don't know where their next meal is coming from, so to be able to just do that is… the other thing I think that I haven't said is that we've started to, I've started to, run listening spaces. So, listening spaces it came about because partly because a lot of the services, a lot of the third sector services and statutory, the staff are really struggling and managers are struggling to support the staff, and the listening space is a structured safe place where a small group of people, so seven people, can come together and listen to one another. Everybody listens to one another for two minutes, and then we go around again and people can say about what's impacted upon them. People are asked to hold their own reactions and feelings and things and just listen to each other, and it's been really moving as to how that's worked. That's been over Zoom, you know, so that will be something that we're going to keep doing, and we're going to try and use it, I think if we can, as a way of inviting residents in to talk about some of the difficult things that are happening in Barrow and help them to be able to share how they feel, even if it's not what other people want to hear, and listen to other people's views. So, we will definitely take that forward.  

I think the other thing that's happened here, and I know it's happened in lots of other places, is it feels like everybody's kind of dropped everything and just decided to help each other, and because we've got a really forward thinking CEO, Sam, the council have been much better at allowing neighbours just to be neighbours and not rushing in and panicking about what people are doing, just to see it as it doesn't have to be a professional or they don't have to be called volunteers, it's just people doing what they know how to do, looking after each other.  

Julie: So, the work that you've been doing, it's obviously having this, kind of, ripple effect beyond the Love Barrow boundaries to you know, within the borough council and wider as well.  

Trina: Yes, I think there's a real appetite between everybody, and it's funny really because I think as I've got older, I've become more ordinary I suppose. I feel a bit like all the training that I've had over the years, it trained me to be a professional, and I'm not saying it wasn't good, it was good. But, there's also something about sometimes you can be trained to be, well (a) too helpful, and (b) to be a bit distant, you know. So, I think those barriers between the people who help and the people who are helped have broken down somewhat because we are all struggling. You know, so, like I said before, the staff are struggling, so it's become much more open I suppose, you know, we're all just people and some people struggle more than others and we can all help each other. So, I think that's been one of the things that's been good, I guess, from COVID.  

Julie: Yes. We've seen that in other forums that we've had about this, feeling of much more equality between professionals and families because everybody is going through the same thing.  

Trina: That's right yes, and sometimes families get that more than we do.  

[Messages for other organisations who might want to do something similar] 

Julie: Yes. So, looking to the future, if other local authorities or borough councils were thinking of doing something similar to what you've done, what advice would you give them?  

Trina: That's a big question, that, because it has been such a journey. I would say, find the champions, find the people who really get it, who really want to make a difference at all levels. So, like we've just said, we're all people, you know, you can have somebody who's a Director of Children's Services and somebody who's a domestic or a child and family worker who can think in the same way, have the same ideas and can support each other, and hang on to them, I would say that's really important. For the senior managers to really know that what they have to do is support the middle managers to make the change, because we found that's often where the obstacles were, and some of it was around risk and anxiety, but I think the really senior managers have got the, kind of, authority to give people permission to work in a different way, haven't they? I think the other thing to say is that when I first set out, and because of the sort of person I am as well, I wanted it to be neat and clear and to know what I was doing and where I was going, and that's not how we are as people. So, the work that we're doing as Love Barrow Together, we are all acknowledging it's messy, we know that we've got the answers but we have to work it out together.  

I suppose one of things that, because what I was expecting you to ask me a little bit about what didn't work, one of the things that has got in the way has just been people really, not being human, it's about that problem of being human that we all, not just the families we work with, have stuff inside of us that makes us act and react in certain ways, and that matters because all of this work is dependent on the relationships we have with each other. So, you know, over the last year I think I've become much better at managing what happens inside of me when I've heard something I don't agree with or somebodies has upset me, particularly with the team when I was managing the Love Barrow Families team that, (a) I don't have to sort it all out, because other people need to be able to have an input in that as well, but (b) I can hold my own feelings inside and appreciate, really appreciate where somebody else is coming from, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. I think sometimes, these things like Love Barrow Families, when people try and do things differently maybe there's not enough attention paid to the messiness and the, that side of-, it's always going to be like this, kind of, you know, it's always going to be a bit bumpy and we just have to find a way of managing that together.  

Julie: Yes, and through that messiness, and through that bumpiness we learn, and we learn what works, we learn what doesn't work and we can adapt it accordingly.  

Trina: Yes, and we learn about ourselves, we learn, you know, about how to manage what's inside of us and what it is that happens and who we are and all of that, don't we?  

[What has been learned over the years] 

Julie: Yes, yes. So, I didn't ask you about what didn't work, apart from what you've just said, is there anything that you think didn't work and that you've learnt from?  

Trina: I think that the environment was very different then, and we didn't appreciate that at the time. At the time when Love Barrow Families started, whilst the services were really chaotic and it felt really difficult, in terms of innovation there was much more, well there was more money, more money and more hope and less fragmentation. So, services have been commissioned differently since then, the health trust that I worked for has split, there's, you know, there's some services that are in one health trust and some services are in another. So, the idea of integrating mainstream services became impossible really because of the environment. I don't know whether that's something that didn't work but it is something to note that, you know, you're constrained really by what's going on in the wider world and the wider system.  

Julie: Yes, and I think that's very important, that you can do your little bit within, to a certain extent, within the local context, but there are always going to be external constraints on what you do.  

Trina: Yes, and I think for me, what I realised, probably about a year ago, is that in a way that doesn't matter, you know? That my joy and my happiness and my satisfaction can come from the moments that I spend with people where I can just sit alongside them. You know, it comes from the meeting we had yesterday where we were all really excited about the values and behavioural stuff that we're doing. You don't have to have everything right, it doesn't have to be big things, you can take joy and satisfaction from small things and we are making a difference, those small things, those 20 families, it does make a huge difference.  

Julie: Yes, and seeing that you're making a difference can be self-affirming as well.  

Trina: Yes, yes. But, I think sometimes when people talk about system change, they are talking about the big stuff aren't they, you know, particularly managers. It's really difficult because I went from being a, sort of, senior practitioner in the world of all these chief execs and things and I assumed that everybody knew stuff and spoke to each other and had relationships, and they don't, you know, they don't. So, whilst we all talk about integration, as everybody, you know, there's lots of other people like me who would say the same thing, it doesn't always happen on the ground, does it? And, I think the things that do happen on the ground, even if they are only small, are just as significant, if not more significant than all that stuff that everybody is talking about that happened, or they want to happen, much higher up.  

Julie: Yes, it's often the little things that make a big difference.  

Trina: It is, yes.  

Julie: That brings me to the end of my questions and things I wanted to talk about, is there anything that we haven't covered Trina that you want to mention, or?  

Trina: I don't think there is, I think I've talked far more that I thought I was going to talk. I do feel like I've said the things that are important, and it's been really good to talk about actually, it's not often. It's a bit like… you can just sit down and tell everybody all about something that we are, so yes, thank you.  

Julie: It's been really, really lovely and really inspiring to hear about what you're doing in my old neck of the woods so I'm really, really happy to have had you on this podcast, so thank you very much Trina.  

[Outro] 

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