Looking Back on Help Through Crisis

Help through Crisis (HtC) was a five year £33m programme, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, bringing together 69 local partnerships across England to support people experiencing crisis. The programme ended in July 2021.

A final event was held on Wednesday 2^nd March 2022 to celebrate the achievements of the programme. Emilie Smeaton from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Evaluation and Customer Insight Team reflects upon what has been learnt about delivering crisis support.

The 69 HtC partnerships addressed a diverse wide range of circumstances (poverty, poor physical and/or mental health, eviction, homelessness, debt, domestic abuse, and unemployment), providing services to meet the needs of over 220,000 people experiencing crisis.

Partnerships provided advice, advocacy and support to match people’s needs and tackle underlying causes of crisis, enabling people to move out of crisis by drawing upon their experiences, skills and strengths.

With just a year left of the HtC programme before the start of COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, partnerships had well-established ways of delivering support, strong referral pathways and local connections. COVID-19 and the subsequent changes to project delivery caused significant upheaval for HtC partnerships, requiring rapid and flexible mobilisation to adapt services to continue to support people in crisis.

Many HtC partnerships witnessed a rise in the numbers of people seeking support. This was attributed to the pressures and stresses the lockdown placed on people, resulting in a rise for support related to mental health, employment, domestic violence and family conflict. Some partnerships saw an increase in people with more complex support needs, for example people facing mental health and financial crises at the same time. There was also a rise in support requests from people who have never previously accessed support but found themselves in crisis due to the impact of COVID-19 and lockdown conditions.

Working alongside the partnerships, the HcT evaluation team were able to develop a set of five key principles for delivering effective support for people in crisis. Full details of these can be found here:

• Offer meaningful person-centred crisis support, including taking a strengths-based approach and giving people who use services a voice in service design and delivery.
• Provide and develop long-term support in recognition that it is not realistic to expect immediate results with people experiencing crisis. It is important to establish connections with other support organisations and develop and test different approaches to service delivery.
• Embed a flexible approach to delivering services in recognition that a person’s needs change over time. Work with partners to respond to national and local changes that affect local crisis support needs.
• Create and maintain a strong network of partners that can offer complementary services and support referrals between services.

Ensure frontline staff have the right skills, expertise and attributes. Implement wellbeing policies and practice to avoid burnout, involve volunteers to increase capacity and holistic support, and consider how people with lived experience can be supported to become volunteers.

The HcT programme showed us that effective partnership working is fundamental to crisis support and brings about wider benefits. These include enhanced opportunities for seeking funding; involvement in wider initiatives; ongoing sharing of knowledge and referral pathways; demonstration of impact; and national and local influencing activity.

Learning from the programme also demonstrates that effective partnership working is supported by agreeing a shared vision; establishing effective governance; having information sharing mechanisms and protocols in place; having the right mix of partners involved; and ensuring effective communication.

There are many benefits of involving service users in service design and delivery of a programme. However, there are also challenges to involving people experiencing crisis due to the complexities of their situations.

To ensure organisations are co-producing with people who use services in an equal and reciprocal partnership, and avoid tokenism, it is necessary for an organisation to ensure they are firmly committed to co-production. This commitment should be championed by organisational leadership, alongside the necessary resources (time, money, dedicated staff capacity) to understand and deliver co-production in a meaningful and effective way.

Overall, partnerships have been very positive about being part of the Help through Crisis programme. They highlighted benefits to their organisations, the people they work with, and their wider local networks. The multi-year funding awarded through the programme and the long-term, holistic approach to crisis support were seen to underpin many of the benefits of HtC.

Partnerships also said being part of the programme had shaped the way they work, as it provided them with the flexibility, tools, and time to develop more effective ways of delivering crisis support. As a result, many partnerships expressed a strong desire to continue with similar approaches to crisis support and were actively exploring ways to sustain this after the HtC programme ends.