Our Approach
Our Appropriate Intervention Plus Model™ (AIM+)
Drawing from three decades of award-winning youth intervention in East London and continual overseas research and collaboration, in partnership with Impetus we have refined and advanced our theory of change model of approach, launching this Autumn.
Our Appropriate Intervention Plus Model™ is a cohesive approach that significantly reduces harm through appropriate outreach, intervention, and cognitive behavioural skills development for creating safety and stability in a young person’s Lifestyle and lived Environment. Plus, longer-term transitional support into an Education and/or Employment outcome progression.
-
Our Lifestyle outreach and street intervention is an essential component and thread that runs through everything we are and do at Streets of Growth and is relentlessly engaged from a young clients pre-entry through to their successful exit with us - including when they relapse. It 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 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 in order to breakthrough and overcome initial resistance. This is the gateway for initiating, engaging and maintaining a young persons change.
-
The central focus of Streets of Growth’s Environment component is safer streets and neighbourhoods to socialise, live and work. Building trust to engage the context in which young people live 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 community cohesion and safety.
-
Our Education component comes in three key elements.
Supporting young people aged 15-21 years ‘at risk’ of being school excluded and to stay in mainstream school education through our street based intervention coaching and mentoring in order to maintain and complete their GCSE’s.
Supporting young people to make the transition from mainstream school education into higher education. For example, adult classes/courses, college and university.
Supporting post 16 young people to reengage back into further education, whereby we signpost and accompany them to appropriate education providers and ensure they complete their course whilst remaining stable in their lifestyle.
Additionally, we work in partnership with exam boards such as AQA and ASDAN. We deliver AQA and ASD
-
Streets of Growth’s Employment component is developed around a young persons readiness and ability to engage and transition into employment and adult working environments.
We are Not a recruiter that simply trys to find jobs for young people. We coach our young clients to be true about their current realities, 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 choice. We don't simply refer a young person in this context, our interventionists and employment entrepreneurs accompany our young clients in their 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.
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
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.
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 though challenging the setback and how many they may have with us, setbacks can be viewed as opportunities for immense learning and resilience.