“Our mantra is we do whatever it takes,” explains Josh MacAlister.
He is one of the co-founders of SHiFT, a national charity which is aiming to break the ‘destructive cycle’ between young people and crime, drugs, violence and exploitation.
While it currently has schemes ongoing in Kingston, Richmond and Greenwich, the first project outside of London has been launched in Tameside, with the backing of the Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.
Special ‘guides’ from SHiFT will work with 27 young people who have been identified as particularly vulnerable, with the aim of getting them out of the criminal justice system, and transforming their wider life.
These guides take on intensive roles and seemingly huge responsibility for the wellbeing of the youngster they support, ranging from answering the phone at 2am to attending medical appointments and accompanying them to court.
Josh describes a story of a guide in London, who obtained a spare set of house keys in order to reach their charge when they wouldn’t answer the door and persuade them to attend an appeal against a college expulsion – which they won.
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“Often if you’re a teacher it’s about getting that kid in school, if you’re a social worker it’s about making sure that child might have a good relationship at home and if you’re the police it’s making sure they stay out of crime,” he says.
“But who’s on the hook for doing whatever it takes to keep that child safe? And that’s the thing that’s missing, it’s a really big thing to step up to.”
At SHiFT, guides come from a range of backgrounds, whether social workers, youth workers, or people who have worked in the criminal justice system or as drug and alcohol support staff.
Unlike the current status quo of local authority care, which sees under pressure social workers struggling with caseloads often as high as 40 each, guides work with just a ‘handful’ of young people.
“They can have that really intensive relationship, seeing those young people everyday, being with them at the moment where they’re at their lowest ebb or their greatest risk and sticking with them relentlessly to bring about positive change,” Josh says.
“And there are a small number of young people in England now where we need that level of intensity if we’re going to stand a chance of getting them on the right track.”
He explains the issues young people are involved in often see them being both exploited by criminals, and committing crime themselves; with being caught up in the illegal drug trade a common theme.
“And that’s often really messy for services to respond to because they are trying to figure out whether they are responding here to a child who is a victim or are they responding to a young person who is a perpetrator,” Josh adds.
“That complexity is part of what conventional traditional services struggle to respond to. Drug related, youth violence – incidents of violence of peer on peer abuse but certainly drugs is a big part of the profile. It’s all connected.
“Part of what prompted us to set up SHiFT in the first place was really tragically sad stories where children, aged 14, 15, 16 who everybody was worried about and everybody was saying, ‘we think something terrible might be about to happen’ but the piecemeal services together couldn’t get their hands around it, couldn’t grip it.
“And part of what SHiFT offers is the chance to do some really intensive focused work where professionals are given the freedom to take huge responsibility for breaking those cycles.”
The young people the charity will be working with over the next 18 months have in many cases been ordered to engage with services, whether through the youth court or police.
They often share common personal histories – children who grew up witnessing domestic violence, being placed on a child protection plan, having been excluded from school or going missing.
Permanent exclusion particularly can have a ‘cascading effect’ that leaves children ‘even more vulnerable’ to exploitation. “It destabilises their wider life,” Josh says.
The length of time each young person will have dedicated support is crucial, the former teacher adds, in terms of building the trust with an adult when they may have felt let down in the past.
“It’s why it’s an 18 month journey because the first few months are testing and quite rightly young people are saying they’ve had loads of other people come along and they haven’t stuck with me and they’ve left,” he says.
“That’s a big part of the initial process but our mantra is do whatever it takes and that means there is never an excuse of saying, the young person’s not engaging – it’s that we have failed to have engaged them.”
The aim at the end of the pilot will be to see ‘much reduced’ interaction with the criminal justice system, with the majority of young people free from crime and more regularly attending school, college, getting and maintaining a job.
“Some of the basics for life really, someone who loves you, somewhere to live and something to do,” Josh says.
“And if those things aren’t in place then it’s much more likely that young people find themselves seeking affirmation, purpose, or stability in criminal networks.”
In Tameside SHiFT is aiming to build a service that can be transformative, less expensive and less ‘faceless’, offering hope for a model which if successful, could be expanded across Greater Manchester and the wider north west. In its schemes in the capital, two thirds of participants have remained crime free.
The charity is collaborating with the council, the Greater Manchester Violence Reduction Unit to deliver the project, with extra funding coming from the Bruno Schroder Trust and the Dulverton Trust.
Tameside council’s deputy leader, Councillor Bill Fairfoull, who has responsibility for children and families, said: “We have quite a high number of children in care, we’ve had quite a rocky journey over the last few years.
“For this to come of London is a big opportunity for Greater Manchester to hopefully make a success of this and we’re very, very pleased to do it
“We’ve been able to react quite quickly, we’ve got a team in place and we are hoping for good results for young people in Tameside.”
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