Help on Your Doorstop

This week I went to a celebration of five years for ‘Connect: Help on Your Doorstep’ – an outreach project in Islington, London. www.helponyourdoorstep.com

I go way back with this project. When I worked at EC1 I wrote the bid to get this through the appraisal stage and then managed the workers for the first couple of years when it was ‘EC1: Help on Your Doorstep’. Steve Lawson initially suggested the idea from a model he had come across in Liverpool and John Warby has been working on the project since its inception. They were both at this event. The EC1 project won a Regeneration and Renewal Award for Best Community Project and we all got to go to some posh dinner in West London. I remember I was given a ‘dress-up’ allowance (one and only time in my life to date) and got my hair done!

It is cited as a ‘holistic outreach model’. ‘Our success is based around our unique approach of taking a wide ranging, comprehensive package of 140 referral options to each and every doorstep in the most deprived neighbourhoods across the borough. This enables us to help resolve interconnected, often complex needs effectively and efficiently’.

It works for me because it takes as its starting point where people are at, not, how many people have we got signed up for our latest promotion. ‘Connect helps 1,600 people per year in Islington, making 3,600 referrals to our 140 partner organisations and delvers 1,100 cases of its own direct support to residents each year’.

Its USP is that after 3 weeks, the advisor checks back with the client to see how things are going and again at 12 weeks to check issues have been resolved. It also addresses silo working as partners have to collaborate.

Another strength of the project is that they tend to hire employees and volunteers who are local and have an empathy with the client group. I am impressed on a weekly basis by the passion and commitment of the two staff, Ken and Shamila who operate out of my office base. One story is particularly poignant. Ken spotted a woman with mental health problems had brought in a damp letter. His queries about this led him to a home visit and to discover she had been living in a flat with no functioning heating for several years and the place was covered in mould and uninhabitable. He got her moved in to temporary accommodation while this was addressed and also sorted out all her other problems including being on the wrong sort of benefits as she was registered as capable to work when she clearly wasn’t. He came back from that first home visit in tears.

One other point to make about this story. At my interview for Peabody I was asked about this project. Community Development is a small world and your reputation goes ahead of you.