10 Highlights from Signal (UK)
Following an extensive pilot period SIGNAL took root in early 2019 and has been going from strength to strength ever since. Most of what follows pre-dates the Pandemic. However, Covid has intensified and exacerbated many underlying problems and given impetus to existing debates on issues such as Public Sector Reform. We find ourselves at the heart of these debates and recognise that it’s time to capitalise on the opportunities they represent for SIGNAL and the Stoplight Global Community. The following is a snapshot of 10 highlights which we believe give a flavour of how the Stoplight Global Community is progressing in the UK.
1) On SIGNAL’s Doorstep: The Gateshead Inquiry
We are undertaking a major piece of work in Gateshead, home of the SIGNAL HUB. Funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation (www.lankellychase.org.uk), whose mission is to build a ‘society where everyone has the opportunity to live a rewarding life’, the project is a key component in an effort to create an environment in which organisations can continuously learn; from their communities and from each other. The project includes Public Sector and VCS organisations with a shared ambition to work together to respond to community-need. A key outcome is to use the learning from The Gateshead Inquiry to feed into Public Sector commissioning processes… As Andy Crosbie, Lankelly Chase Coordinator for Gateshead explains:
Organisations will be using SIGNAL in their conversations with their communities. They will be looking at pooled SIGNAL data, considering what this tells them about their overlapping communities, and working to identify new ways in which they could all work together to support their locality. We hope that the collective learning and sense-making will lead to more collective approaches and joint activity.
2) The Power of Relationships: Oxford HUB www.oxfordhub.org
To be working in Oxford may seem, at first glance, to be a world away from the North East of England, the home of SIGNAL and an area still associated with industrial decline and a widening gap between it and other more affluent areas in the South of the country. However, as Sara Fenandez, CEO of the Oxford HUB explains, the strength of SIGNAL lies in its ability to dig deeper than the 2-dimensional stereotypes imposed on the UK’s communities allow, and to get beyond analysis to creating practical solutions:
Oxford Hub is a place-based charity bringing people and organisations together to build a better Oxford. Oxford is an unequal city. There are vast disparities in wealth and access to opportunities across Oxford, impacting people of all ages and backgrounds. We want to change this with the power of relationships. Through Signal, we will support families to work collaboratively in their neighbourhoods to achieve their own goals, and to better shape any local targeted interventions. This will also be a starting point for micro-grants and direct cash transfers.
3) An Agent of Change: North of Tyne Community Led Local Development (CLLD) — a Regeneration Programme https://northoftyneclld.weebly.com/
This major regeneration programme focuses on one of the most socially disadvantaged areas in the UK. The project, which is designed to engage approximately 2,000 people, is managed by Newcastle City Council. SIGNAL is being used to ensure that it is a genuinely ‘community-led’ project. And not just by the 40 stakeholders who represent the community, but by the households that are the community. We are finding that the use of SIGNAL not only transforms the relationship that organisations build with their clients, but it also enriches the programme management and enables agile planning that can respond to emerging need. This is how the Chair of the CLLD Programme, Anthony Woods Waters describes it:
The Project is wedded to the central importance of community as creators and innovators of change. SIGNAL allows us to support and measure change that extends from individual, to household, to neighbourhood, to area, across our programme geography. It also allows us to plan for the future and create a long-lasting legacy driven by the community itself.
4) Health & Wellbeing: Harlequins Foundation in Richmond, South East England https://www.harlequins.foundation/
Driven by a desire to understand how best to make best use of its resources, the Harlequins Foundation, the charitable arm of the Harlequins Rugby Club, has provided funding for 3 of the organisations it supports to use SIGNAL to engage with their beneficiaries. Marc Leckie the CEO explains that:
Harlequins is a health & wellbeing, Sports Foundation. The Foundation is the embodiment of the rugby club’s belief in putting our communities at the heart of everything we do.
Our focus is on inspirational, sustainable, and transformative solutions that tackle inequality, poor health and the challenges facing the most vulnerable in society using education, skills development, and entrepreneurship.
We believe that SIGNAL will help us to truly understand the root causes of deprivation in the areas we operate in, enabling us to support individuals with interventions which have been co-developed with them, thereby improving their chances of success.
5) It Works! Remote Facilitation
On 23rd March, when Lockdown changed everything here in the UK, we were compelled to take a long hard look at how we could continue to offer SIGNAL in circumstances where face-to-face meetings were impossible. We therefore undertook a 3-month Action Research project that demonstrated the efficacy of remote facilitation and its growing importance in an environment in which many partners are recognising that they will need to deliver online/remote services for the foreseeable future. We are currently working with Newcastle Futures (which provides support services to long-term unemployed) https://www.newcastlefutures.co.uk/ to help them integrate SIGNAL into their ‘digital offer’. They anticipate that going forward only 40% of their service will be delivered face-to-face. The key to success will be for Newcastle Futures to resist the government-led trend to towards automated digital services but instead emphasise the facilitated nature of SIGNAL delivered remotely, on the grounds that now, more than ever, we need to take an holistic approach to understanding how best to co-design solutions. We regard this opportunity as a Pilot Project, the learning from which will enable us to design similar offers bespoke to the particular circumstances of our new and existing partners.
6) Andrea’s story — A Mountain to Climb in a Global Pandemic
Andrea is an unemployed single Mum with 3 sons each of whom has their own challenges ranging from severe dyslexia to auto-immune disorder and autism. She described her life as ‘living in a bubble’ in which she struggled to protect her sons and manage their complex needs at the cost of her own physical and mental health.
“SIGNAL really helped me. It opened my eyes. It allowed me to take control and set my own priorities and goals”.
Then came Covid. It was with trepidation that Sandra, Andrea’s support worker, invited her to complete a second survey via Zoom. Against expectations, Andrea presented as a totally transformed individual. Instead of being down and depressed she was smiling, talkative and upbeat. In a word she seemed happy. So, how had this happened? The turning point was when she read a piece that Sandra had posted on the organisation’s Well-Being Facebook page about how to ‘be kind to yourself’. That simple post germinated the seed that was now ready to grow and bloom. SIGNAL had enabled Andrea to discover yellows and greens where she thought there would be reds; ‘be kind to yourself’ gave her the permission to change her life.
She started exercising for the first time in 17 years. She graduated from pilates and squats to taking herself off for walks in the country. To do this she had to take a leap of faith and trust her sons to be able to look after themselves. Short walks proved that they could, so she extended the walks, returning home to find that her son who has always struggled with basic tasks was now cooking. Andrea is fit and healthy, her energy is infectious, and she has inspired other women to join her on the walks to experience the immense boost to their mental health and wellbeing. Her sons are much more independent, and their health and wellbeing has improved too. Andrea is applying for jobs but is no longer stressed or depressed at not yet getting one. The most significant green on her second survey is ‘self-worth’ which she has marked as an Achievement. And, yes, she really did have a mountain to climb, a real one: — Ben Nevis to be exact, the highest mountain in the United Kingdom; a goal she achieved on the 27th August 2020.
7) ‘Entrepreneurial Spirit’ — a Collective Response.
A remarkably consistent trend that occurs almost universally across the board is that the indicator that is most amber is Entrepreneurial Spirit (we have goals, but we don’t know how to achieve them). We have shared the accumulated data of over 1,000 households with our partners and this is leading to much discussion about the significance of this trend and how best to respond to it, especially as the percentage of ambers on that indicator has increased since lock down. Our partners are using this data to highlight that a population living in a ‘socially deprived’ area has unlocked potential and assets that can be invested in, rather than being a drain on resources. It is of particular interest to the CLLD project described at point 3) above.
8) The Voice of the BAME Community
We have long-standing partners including JET https://www.jetnorth.org.uk/ and Riverside Community Health Project https://www.riversidechp.co.uk/ who work with immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the North East of England. The BAME community has embraced Signal as a methodology and are using it to raise their voices in underrepresented spaces. Typically, members of these communities are significantly more green in areas such as ‘desire to develop skills’ and ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and they have higher levels of education than their non-BAME counterparts. We are in discussion with our partners about the significance of this data, which highlights enormous untapped potential. It will be used to ensure that the voice of the BAME community will not be overlooked in relation to regional and local government policies being developed to respond to the anticipated huge increase in unemployment. For example, our partners are exploring the role of self-employment, as an alternative option to seeking employment, to harness the skills and ambitions of the BAME community.
9) SIGNAL Accessible to Everyone.
We have recently developed an ‘Easy Read’ version for the Learning Disability community. We are currently running a pilot with a major National Learning Disability charity. Already a major theme has emerged: 69% of participants have highlighted that ‘Eating a Healthy Diet’ is either yellow or red. The charity is now looking at practical solutions to address this issue and we are working with another of our partners, Food Nation https://www.foodnation.org/, a social enterprise specialising in engaging the community in good food and healthy eating, to design a programme to introduce affordable, enjoyable and easy-to-cook, healthy food.
10) Beyond the Emergency
SIGNAL is being recognised as the fundamental component to inform service delivery and as such it is being promoted by business partners as central to their core offer. This is illustrated by an initiative born out of the Covid emergency but now developing into a permanent, sustainable service predicated on creating active ‘members’ rather than servicing the needs of passive ’customers’. Thus ’ Food Pantry’ scheme is being developed by Building Futures East https://buildingfutureseast.org/ to respond to existing need, to support food access for the most vulnerable families and individuals within a framework for wider personal development, support and capacity building linked to vocational, functional skills and employment training. SIGNAL will lie at the heart of this process to ensure that the community ‘members’ are at all times in control of their development plan.
We know SIGNAL works: and we know that the Covid Pandemic has intensified the need for a methodology that can put people in control of their own lives as governments across the World struggle to maintain their countries’ shattered economies. We believe that SIGNAL thrives where there is good rapport between facilitator/mentor and household. Our collective challenge is to find ways of maintaining that relationship in circumstances where the preferred method of face-to-face facilitation will not be always possible. The new mantra is for organisations of all shapes and sizes to be able to offer ‘blended’ services; a mixture of face-to-face and online. The Poverty Stoplight movement is no different.
Find out more at clearsignal.org and povertystoplight.org
