The Changing Futures programme is a £91.8 million joint funded initiative between Government and The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest community funder in the UK. The programme funds local organisations working in partnership in 15 local areas across England to better support those who experience multiple disadvantage.
Over the last year, MEAM has brought the local programme leads together for regular discussions about key aspects of the work. In this series of blog posts, we reflect on some of the topics covered, drawing on their insight and input from others in the Changing Futures programme and the wider MEAM Approach network.
In this third blog of the “Reflections and Learning” series, we take a closer look at the differences between sustainability and legacy and how areas are approaching building learning from their work into the wider system.
Unavoidably, programmatic and funded work has a start, middle and end. Local areas cannot start this kind of work without thinking about endings and inevitably, what comes next. However, they also know that a sustainable and long-term legacy approach is the only way to truly tackle multiple disadvantages and the systemic drivers that cause and perpetuate it.
At a conversation with programme leads of Changing Futures areas, we spoke about how they are approaching “endings,” thinking about what comes next locally and making their work more sustainable and “folded in” to the local system that responds to multiple disadvantage.
For many people, not just in Changing Futures, but more broadly in work focusing on social-inclusion and challenging multiple disadvantage, there is a concern around how difficult it is to make “sustainability” happen. All too often, work is leveraged on short-term funding, and once it finishes, we end up back at square one, arguing for more investment and seeing a hiatus in work. This is effort that could be better spent elsewhere, it destabilises local progress on systems change and it prevents areas responding fully to the needs of people experiencing multiple disadvantage.
This is also a clear concern of some funders and policy makers, who would prefer to focus on the longer-term impacts of local work.
So, how do local areas focus on sustainability and the legacy of their work, particularly when the various streams of funding that they rely on continue to be stop/start, and delivered in silos, while increasingly asking for “sustainability” and “long-term legacy” as part of their outcomes.
Sustainability vesus legacy
Our conversations with local areas on this topic pointed to an important distinction between “sustainability” and “legacy”, terms that are often used interchangeably.
In summary, “sustainability” was something that local areas associated with the continuation of activity, either frontline delivery or strategic action, that was funded to deliver some sort of output with a focus on multiple disadvantage. “Legacy” was something that was associated more with long-term changes in the behaviours of the wider system, which could mean there was less need for a specifically-funded intervention for someone experiencing multiple disadvantage in the future.
The role of sustainability
There was consensus that seeking to maintain some form of frontline delivery service responsive to the needs of people experiencing multiple disadvantage is key part of sustainability. The visibility of this frontline work, and the need for the capacity it provides in systems which are already over-stretched, was seen as particularly valuable both for individuals and in helping to make the case for broader changes to local systems, strategy, policy and funding.
There was also strong support for continued investment in the task of “systems convening,” the work of supporting the local system to come together and maintain a collective focus on people experiencing multiple disadvantage. This activity is rarely funded by silo-focused delivery funding and has been a vital part of the Changing Futures programme. Sustaining the culture of sectors working together was seen as an important part of this, making sure that the key values that brought people together in the first place remain, and that local partnerships can be sustained.
What about legacy?
The group also spoke about many things that they hoped would continue across the system, which would be seen as “legacy” in the distinction above.
For many, legacy was about “system change” – the long-lasting changes to the business as usual activity that affects people experiencing multiple disadvantage. Local areas talked about long-term goals to affect and change the siloed nature of service delivery, to provoke an earlier response to needs and to ultimately not need an expensive specialised service that has to respond to crises. Areas told us about successes such as:
- Changing standard delivery models, to incorporate learning from Changing Futures into homelessness services and adult social care, including better case conferencing and collaboration.
- Increased receptiveness to new ideas, through coproduction.
- More effective and efficient delivery approaches, with colocation models and team structures with multiple organisations. More joined up commissioning practice, with different strands of money jointly commissioning services with broader outcomes.
These are important and vital successes, but there was also an underlying worry within the group that in such a difficult local climate, with a lack of funding and growing demand, that many of these changes would not stick long-term.
How can we be more successful at sustainability and legacy?
Local areas talked about the following as practical actions:
- Making the case and showing its impact on people. Areas spoke about communicating out the impact of their work to commissioners and politicians as being vital to retaining interest in the work and influencing strategic development.
- Where possible, show that this work has a positive financial impact on the system overall. Stress the benefits of prevention and co-ordinating work before crisis.
- Coproduction is key. Including people with lived experience in the design and delivery of services draws on insight, makes work more relevant and demonstrates to the rest of the system that there is a different way to do this work.
- Approach areas of the system that are interested in this work and willing to help lead change. Some Changing Futures areas have found Integrated Care Boards to be particularly receptive to “whole-system” conversations about people experiencing multiple disadvantage.
In conclusion, for local areas to offer a sustainable response to multiple disadvantage, it still remains important that money is available to do this, whether from local or national sources. However, as well as delivering frontline activity, the work must also be focused on long-term, preventative intervention that gradually reduces demand and increases the local system’s capacity to work across siloes.