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Working with young people: A profile of projects funded by the Partnership Drugs Initiative

Chapter 6: Relationships with Other Agencies

This chapter describes the nature and significance of the projects' relationships with other bodies. It begins by exploring the importance of their links with their host agencies.

Integration of project and host agency

Each of the PDI Projects was located within a larger 'host' agency which provided an appropriate administrative and professional context for the project and its work. The project workers reported that important benefits resulted from the project being part of a well-established, well-connected and well-respected local organisation. Among other things this facilitated access to clients, enhanced the project's acceptability within the community and enabled the project to draw upon the local knowledge of the host agency. Being part of a well-known national organisation was also seen as giving a project status and enhancing its acceptability.

According to the accounts of the project workers and their managers, the extent to which a project was integrated with its host agency played a significant part in its ability to function effectively. It was clear from the experiences of those who were interviewed that well integrated projects enjoyed considerable advantages over those which were not. There were three main dimensions to integration each of which had important implications for projects' effectiveness.

First, a complementary relationship between the work of the host organisation and that of the project contributed to the success of the latter in a number of ways. Principally, it increased the perceived value of the project among host agency staff, promoted a co-ordinated approach to work within the organisation as a whole and imparted a sense of value and belonging to the project and its workers. In most projects, a complementary relationship meant that the project extended the work of the host organisation, either by increasing its capacity to discharge its original remit or by adding to its scope through the development of a related service.

With some projects the level of integration was such that host and project were intended to feed into each other through cross referral and joint working. For example, the Aberlour outreach project for families with drug misuse problems will refer some of their clients to the Brenda House service which offers support to drug users who have progressed to the stage at which they are considering work or education. Another example of this is the West Lothian Detached Street Work Project. This project is a core part of the West Lothian Youth Action project and provides an outreach service which is explicitly geared towards encouraging young people to become involved with the wider project or with other services. However, in addition to acting as a recruitment mechanism for the wider project, some of the sessional staff in the West Lothian project combine their street work role with a wider remit which encompasses other aspects of the host agency's work, for example through participation in its befriending and peer education projects.

In the great majority of projects, integration was reported as being good. However, there were also some examples of projects in which this was not the case, or where there had been difficulties in the past. For example, the following project worker did not feel 'connected' with the rest of the host agency, largely because she could not see how her project was intended to relate to the other services offered by the host:

"It's quite difficult actually, because I think my post is really quite separate from the work of the rest of the project. I am required to do an afternoon of duty where I just see anyone who comes in. But that's very rarely related directly to my post. I suppose the answer is that it doesn't really fit".

As the above extract shows, projects which were not so clearly linked to the host agency's services could suffer from a sense of isolation and detachment which could, in turn, have a damaging effect upon the morale of project staff.

According to the project workers and their managers, the nature of the host agency in terms of whether or not it had a specific focus on drugs did not seem to matter as far as the effectiveness of the project was concerned. What did appear to matter was the degree and quality of integration between the project and its host. Where this relationship was designed to be complementary, two services, each with its own distinctive focus, could work well together. There were several examples of substance misuse projects complementing the activities of a host project with a focus on young people or youth work. Indeed, there could be distinct advantages to being located within an agency for which drugs was not the primary focus. In particular, such partner agencies could provide an enhanced potential for internal referral and could make a wider range of expertise available to the project. A good example of this was the East Ayrshire Substance Misuse Family Support Project which was established to complement a service offered to young carers by the East Ayrshire Carers' Centre. Here the arrangement of offering support to young carers affected by drug misuse issues in a setting which is not specifically drug related appears to work well. Although the Family Support Project has a dedicated worker, the young carers affected by drug and alcohol misuse receive additional support within the context of the young carers' project as a whole. The Family Support Worker also plays a role within the host agency and other staff members, primarily those involved with the young carers' work, also engage with the young carers who receive support from the Family Support Worker. This arrangement also means that there is no stigma attached to the young carers on the substance misuse programme. Another example is the Families First project. While this project offers parents one-to-one work with a drugs worker targeting their drug use, it can also mobilise a range of individual outreach work on parenting and household skills from one of its allied family workers. In addition it is able to arrange group activities and support for the parents and their children at one of its two partner family centres.

A second important dimension of integration was the extent to which the members of the host agency understood clearly the nature of the project's work and objectives. This was not always the case. In one project the problem resided in a lack of understanding on the part of the wider agency staff of the nature of detached work:

"I was actually concerned at a voluntary management committee, do they actually know anything about this project? And they need to, they are the important people apart from the young people… detached work is probably the least known about in terms of the people involved in this project, and by that, I mean the management committee. From my kinda first discussions, there's not really anybody that's really totally clued in on what detached youth work is all about and I think that's fairly interesting in itself".

The problem was that the detached youth work approach represented a significant departure from the way in which the host agency had worked in the past and from the kind of work it was familiar with. As a result, an attempt was made to educate staff and volunteers about the new approach. To this end, all staff and volunteers participated in a team-building residential event which, according to project staff, succeeded in promoting greater understanding and better working relations. Steps were also being taken to actively involve host agency volunteers in the detached youth work project.

Although such a lack of understanding was reported in only two of the projects, since there is potential for it to be repeated in any new initiative, it is clearly not something that should be dismissed lightly. Any lack of understanding is likely to act as a significant barrier to co-operation and joint working between projects and their partner agencies. Fortunately, in the great majority of cases it appeared that members of the host organisation had a satisfactory awareness of the nature and modus operandi of the new project. In some cases, this was facilitated by staff members being actively prepared for the arrival of the new project by being thoroughly briefed on its aims, methods of working and on how it would relate to the host agency and its services.

Integration could also be facilitated or impeded by the way in which a project and its host were organised and managed. Not surprisingly, if project workers were based in the same premises as host agency staff there appeared to be considerable benefits as far as the development of collaboration was concerned. Attendance at meetings of the partner agencies also helped to promote a sense of involvement, to obviate feelings of isolation and to facilitate joint working. In a small number of projects, however, the workers did not feel welcomed or supported by the host organisation and this could have a very adverse effect upon their morale. For example, in one instance project staff resented being required to pay for the use of the premises of one of their partner agencies describing the request as a "kick in the teeth". This project also experienced problems with its other partner agency, Social Work, which was similarly perceived as being 'unsupportive' on account of its alleged failure to provide adequate office space and equipment.

In the main there tended to be a high degree of accord between projects and the agencies within which they were located in terms of their ethos or philosophy. The exception was a project in which there was a difference of approach to the prescribing of methadone as a solution to problematic drug use. However, there were one or two examples of partnership agencies having conflicting expectations of the project. This, in turn, could create difficulties for the project workers. For example, in one project, staff felt torn between the differing expectations of their local authority and voluntary sector sponsors:

"I feel that in this project, it's a hybrid. You're neither fish nor fowl. You're not a local authority and you're not voluntary sector. You're a bit of both".

Another project found itself having to contend with a supervisory schedule at both of its partner agencies, each of whom had different expectations of them. As the following quotation from one project manager indicates, differences in culture and practice between partner organisations could give rise to difficulties:

"There's a certain level of agreement that's workable with. You know, I don't think it's brilliant. But we're managing to co-exist. And in some senses maybe that's just what we have to expect. We are 3 quite different organisations with different expectations and the, you know, the politics within each organisation obviously has an effect on - you've got your stances you know. But it has, it's been quite rocky. But we're managing. We have been trying hard to iron things out".

The clear lesson to be learned from this is that organisations which are partners to a bid should also be thoroughly familiar with each other and their expectations of the project in order to ensure a consistent approach.

Relations with external agencies

Developing and maintaining constructive relationships with a range of external agencies was seen as being crucial to the work of the projects. This was especially important as far as referrals - both inward and outward - were concerned. Indeed in some cases, a project's key mission was to channel young people into other services.

Other agencies could be important to a project in other ways. For instance, they could deliver specialist inputs, supply important information or assist a project in its activities. As an example, the Angus project benefited greatly from other organisations making space available for its outreach service in schools, social work offices and community flats:

"Just sort of local youth spaces. We've got really good relationships where we could even sort of borrow rooms there to meet young people if that's what they want … The school's been really good as well, the school's allowed us to, provided us with rooms to meet young people in. Within school time as well".

Most of the projects had worked hard at networking with related services and agencies and, on the whole, reported having been able to develop constructive relationships with them. It appeared that positive working relationships were easier to establish in rural communities where there seemed to be an enhanced culture of partnership working, perhaps as a consequence of the relatively small number of agencies and services working in these areas.

Relationships with other agencies could be adversely affected by perceived overlaps in their work or by boundary disputes. This could give rise to serious tensions between projects and other organisations. Sometimes boundary problems occurred, not because there was overlap between the work of the project and other services but because the nature and purpose of the project had not been communicated with sufficient clarity. Once this was done and the distinctive contribution of the project was established, the problem tended to be resolved.

The issue of ownership was particularly problematic where the work of the project actually overlapped with that of other services. For instance, one street work project had experienced difficulties with community education as a result of its inclusive approach to working with young people:

"There is a shining example at the minute because essentially a lot of young people in this area aren't engaging with community education at all but they're very happy to work with us. That's embarrassing for the council especially when they give us so much of our core funding".

Sometimes overlapping responsibilities could engender a hostile competitiveness between a project and external agencies:

"The other thing we're all probably learning is in relation to partnership working. Our experience so far has been that people shit on us. We're not out to manipulate, we're not out to gain, but …I think people are quite competitive and we're not. We're doing what we're doing and we'll share it with you…We've got to the stage where it's like, don't say to anybody, because they'll steal all our ideas".

Given the problem which overlapping functions could pose, it was especially helpful to projects to be able to claim that they were providing a service which addressed a clearly identified gap in provision. In this respect, the more a project was able to present itself as offering a unique service the better. This not only avoided problematic overlaps with other services, it also enhanced the project's perceived utility and made it more clearly identifiable as a potential referral outlet. The Inverclyde, Easterhouse, Link and Time 4 U projects were all examples of services which benefited from having a unique role within their communities. This role appeared to be especially valued when it was perceived as being complementary to the services provided by other agencies or where the project's remit extended to increasing the uptake of the latter.

A final danger for projects in their relationships with other agencies was that their very usefulness could rebound on them in the sense that they could find themselves being used to supplement, or substitute for, statutory provision in a context of the latter's shortage of resources:

"I think what is happening is services like ours could easily become a bolt on in terms of what social work can't do because they don't have the resources to do it. We are working in a child protection environment. We're working with really vulnerable families who have really complex needs. Traditionally those are the people that the social work department work with. They can't do it. They can only do child protection enquiries just about, and that's it".

A small number of projects were especially conscious of this danger and had taken steps to try to deal with it by tightening their referral procedures in an attempt to avoid being exploited as a resource for cases which they believed should more appropriately be dealt with by statutory services.

Relationship with funding body

A common concern expressed by project staff related to the duration of the project's funding. Several workers and managers claimed that, in their view, the typical three year funding period imposed restrictions on the project's strategic activities and could have an adverse impact upon the career decisions of staff members. It was feared that anxieties over the continuation of funding might encourage workers to move on, especially when a project entered the final stages of its funding. Further concern was expressed that, at that stage of a project's history, it would be difficult to find replacement staff. There was also a feeling that a project might be closed just when it was beginning to establish itself.

Several projects altered their aims or approach from that contained within the original proposal in order to accommodate changed circumstances or priorities. For example, Time 4 U in Kirkcaldy increased the role of outreach work in its service and shifted the emphasis of its work towards the children. The Reiver project abandoned its proposed group work intervention model in favour of a flexible, one-to-one counselling approach with young people. The group work model was seen as being impractical in a rural area given the difficulty of arranging and sustaining group meetings in a rural context. Equally importantly, intervening on an individual basis was felt to constitute a more child-centred approach, allowing the intervention to be tailored to each client.

In every case alterations to the original formulation were undertaken only after seeking the approval of the PDI sponsors. The latter were universally praised for having responded to proposals for changes to the original specifications in a flexible and wholly supportive way. This flexibility of approach on the part of the funding body was greatly valued by the projects concerned and was regarded by them as having made a significant contribution to the appropriate and successful development of their initiatives. The PDI's willingness to allow projects to be innovative and to take risks was especially appreciated by some of the projects:

"I think the good thing about the Lloyds money was that it allowed a lot of flexibility to set up the project, and allowed it to be what we consider innovative, and try different things. Lloyds pitching of it was, well my understanding was that it was always a pilot project that was there to change things. If we had got the money directly through social work - if it had been made available, which it might not have been - we'd have been far more tied to the model that we first set up".

Finally, projects also welcomed the absence of close monitoring and pressure from their sponsor while they were finding their feet. For example, the manager of the Highland Mentoring Scheme was clear that being given the scope to develop slowly and without undue pressure regarding time-scales and referral targets had brought dividends in terms of both mentor and client participation in their project. The staff of other projects were equally appreciative:

"I think TSB are great in that regard. They don't, I mean, they have certain criteria we must fulfil, but having been at a couple of the get-togethers with managers of different projects, I get a sense that they want to see the project doing the work rather than breathing down their necks and creating extra work which takes away from what you're there to do in the first place. I find that really helpful".

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