Emma met with John bell of ESF Works the other day to discuss the Working Families Everywhere approach.

A video for the interview is to follow shortly, but in the interim take a look at the this recent q and a to get an idea of how Working Families Everywhere is going to tackle the 100,000 never worked families in the UK.

Q. Emma, thank you very much for talking to ESF Works today. As you know, ESF will soon start working directly with families, targeting some of the families with the deepest problems and most difficulty finding work. You’ve recently got involved with a parallel initiative, Working Families Everywhere – could I start by asking you to outline what WFE is all about?

A. WFE has a simple premise, we believe every family can be a working family. There are at least 100000 families in the UK that do not work and survive soley on benefits. They feel like no one wants or needs them and so they have no sense of purpose. By using what I call ‘people helping people’, we ask the families how they can help other people and give them the opportunity to understand how good it feels to be needed. There are already a number of fantastic organisations that support what I call ‘troubled’ families; families that are without work and are troubled by debt, addiction, kids in care and so on, but some families can have 22 different agencies ‘poking’ them and telling them what they should be doing. This is done with good heart, but no one has thought about having employment as the common goal that the family can work towards and asking them how they can help us.

Q. Why do you think taking a family focused approach offers something beyond more traditional individual employment support?
A. When you or I are given a life changing decision we don’t keep it to ourselves and neither to do people that are unemployed. They talk to their families. I know of countless situations where someone has been offered work and the family has said ‘don’t take the job!’ because they worry about how it will affect their benefits and so on. If we focus on the family as a unit, we can get everyone working together, helping each-other in moving towards paying their own way and living better lives.

Q. At the heart of the approach are what you call Family Champions – who are they, and what do they do?

A. The families I have spoken to have told me that they want to work, they just don’t know where to begin. The Family Champions know the community, they know what’s available to help the families with any barrier they encounter and they work alongside the support agencies and say ‘what you’re already doing is fantastic, but how can make all this effort support the family in to work? They also know how to find jobs, the jobs that aren’t advertised, by knocking on doors, asking questions and using every bit of resource in their area to move their families towards employment.

Q. So the people already involved come from a wide variety of backgrounds and experience – what would you say are the common factors, the things that a really good Family Champion needs to offer?

A. The Family Champion can be summed up in three words – caring, capable, creative, that’s what you need to be a Family Champion. Caring because they really need to want to help the families and understand what a huge shift it will be for someone who has never worked to consider employment. They are there to hold that families hand until they are ready to let go.
Capable because the Family Champion works with the family, the agencies, finding community, voluntary, charitable and government support as well as sourcing employment opportunities. Creative because no two families are the same and the Family Champion will have to adapt to support each family in the best possible way.

Q. And from your experience so far, what sorts of results would you expect to see, what sort of things happen when you work with families.

A. We have already begun our pilot I am delighted to say that we have already got our first family in to work in Blackpool. These families have lost their way and the change in their dynamic and focus is remarkable when they have someone there to say, ‘I can show you how to get back on track and look after yourself’. ….

Q. We held a workshop recently for professionals interested in family focused work, particularly aimed at the sort of organisations likely to get involved in the new ESF programme. They flagged up a number of areas they thought would be particularly challenging, and I’d like to get your view of how they might be tackled. Firstly – and I think you’ve been quite vocal about this – there are a tremendous number of different agencies involved with these sorts of families, often with different agendas, and often in a relationship with them that might not be that positive. How do you fit a new intervention into that environment? How do you get it come across as positive?

A. I have always said the agency intervention is always done with the best possible intention and good heart. However, if you were someone that was being told how to live every aspect of your life, when to dress, when to clean, without any goal to work towards you end up without any sense of purpose or feeling of being wanted. The Family Champion with marry up every scrap of existing support and say right right guys, what can we do together to get this family in to work? It’s proven that employment and a sense of purpose works better than being ‘poked’. Some families have had intervention for over thirty years, if we aim towards work as the ultimate goal, a family won’t need thirty years of poking as well as saving money for the taxpayer and the government. More importantly the family will have a much happier existence.

Q. And how do you get what you’re doing aligned with everything else that’s going on, get the cooperation of hard pressed other agencies who’ve already got a lot on their plates?

A. This is why recruiting the right type of person as the Family Champion is so important. If anything, the support of the Family Champion will lessen the strain on agencies, as the sooner a family can get in to work, the better they will be able to function. If that’s a not a good reason to work with the Family Champion then I don’t know what is!

Q. Then some expressed real worries about, as they saw it, getting involved in other people’s business. The sort of things they had in mind where the family might be involved in things they really wouldn’t want others or ‘the state’ knowing about. Or there might be very different views between family members about whether to take up a job. As well as all the issuers that come when there are children in a household. So it’s a non trivial thing people are going to be getting in to. What’s been your experience of how real those sorts of worries are? How has WFE addressed them?

A. The first thing we need to remember is that no two families are the same. You don’t know what the family dynamic is until you meet them and listen to their stories. It is not the Family Champion’s job to address issues of crime, child protection and so on, that’s why they have agency intervention. By communicating with all existing support structures, everyone working with the family can work together to provide a realistic idea of the issues they need to address to get the family moving forward.

Q. People also suspected that really effective work would be very time consuming and intensive. What’s your view of the sort of level of input they should be anticipating will be needed to make a difference?

A. Depending on the family it could take two weeks or two years to get a family back in to work. The Family Champions will visit their families in their own homes as well as keeping in regular contact. Our pilot schemes in Hull, Blackpool and Westminster have ten families assigned to each Family Champion and this is working well. We are learning as we go and the great feedback we are already receiving shows it is not always about the amount of time we spend with the family but the quality of support the Family Champion provides.

Q. Many if not most of the families we are talking about are concentrated in areas where there’s really very little work about, and they may well be on the receiving end of post code discrimination. Given this is all about trying to move people with pretty thin CVs into work when there’s an over supplied labour market, how realistic can aspirations be? Isn’t there a risk we simply raise expectations only for people to get knocked back?

A. I am sick of hearing that there aren’t any jobs out there. There are loads of hidden jobs out there and the Family Champion is involved in order to find them. There is also the idea of if you can’t take a job then make a job. I am an entrepreneur and started my business from scratch – there is nothing to stop a family working together to start their own business, all they need is a bit of inspiration and guidance to get started. Part of the Family Champions role could be to work with the family to up-skills them for relevant roles in the local area and arrange appropriate training.

Q. What have you found to be the best sources of support, ideas, and resources for gearing up to work with families? Who would you turn to for advice?

A. The most important dynamic of Working Families Everywhere is seek out every possible resource that could help a family back in to work. The Family Champion will encourage families to utilise all the resources in their area. We also have some fantastic resources through our website and Facebook pages where anyone can get involved and share stories about what worked for them. Working Families Everywhere have provided some short sessions on maximizing relationships and multi agency working to help support enhance the skills of the Family Champions encouraging them to make the most of every conversation they have.

Q. Finally, how would you sum up why we should all get involved in this area?

A. Working Families Everywhere will be a success if everyone gets involved. Instead of vilifying these families we need to think about how we could help support a family we know that are without work to get on them road to employment. If we all contribute we will save valuable resources in the long term, which will go back in to the country and move us all ‘up the scale’ towards living better lives.
ESF Works carries resources to support anyone interested in working with families, including links through to Working Families Everywhere – and you’re looking to sign up new Family Champions now, so I hope this will help the different initiatives we’re involved with work well together, now and into the future. Hopefully we can come back to all this in a year or so’s time and look at how we’ve all got on. In the meantime Emma, thank you once again for your time, and best of luck with Working Families Everywhere

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