Volunteer with Changing Futures North East

At a glance

Causes

Children / families
Social care
Young people

Other details

Organisation type:

Charity

Geographical remit:

Local

Objectives

Changing Futures North East believes the relationships in our lives matter! They really matter. A variety of strong, healthy relationships within and outside of the family protect us for harm and help us thrive. Conflicted, dysfunctional or damaged relationships can have a huge impact on individuals, families and organisations, and prevent people from feeling and doing well, and reaching their potential.

Changing Futures North East thinks this common sense notion needs to be at the heart of public policy and at the heart of the practice of the agencies, staff and volunteers who work with children, families and communities.

Consequently, the Charity seeks to improve children’s lives in three distinct ways:

Developing and delivering services to support individuals to have and to maintain healthier relationships
Developing and delivering services to help couples and families have and maintain healthier relationships
Supporting and enabling organisations to have better relationships

We provide services including couples interventions (Moving on for separated and intact couples; mediation; therapy), family communications work, mentoring, support for looked after children, and lead Hartlepool’s Healthy Relationships partnership to help other agencies build a strong couple relationship focus that enables more effective outcomes for families and for children.

The help we offer has been evaluated to show reductions in parental conflict, improvements in family communication, improved parenting alliance, improved mental health and emotional wellbeing. We use evidence based tools to evaluate outcomes.

Research evidence shows that improving relationships within families, in particular parental relationships, has a huge impact on children’s outcomes - including how well they do in education, how they go on to manage their own relationships as adults, and their health and employment outcomes.

Activities

Family relationships and communication are improved by families themselves, with us supporting them to do this in a number of different ways:

Our “Moving On” programme which began life as a 8 session programme for separated parents in entrenched conflict, which helped improve parenting alliance and communication (independently evaluated by DWP with good evidence of sustained outcomes). It now works with anyone in a parenting role (including grandparents) and couples that are together, or separated.
We offer Mediation for couples that separate and have a legal dispute (e.g. child residence, financial issues/debt, child contact)
An Independent Visitors programme working with Looked After children that might struggle to develop positive relationships (evidence shows a risk factor for poor romantic and parenting relationships). A volunteer works with each young person for at least 2yrs.
In partnership with a local authority, we offer Couples Therapy (“Mentaliszation based” e.g. helping people understand their own thoughts and feelings better, and accurately understand their partners) for a small group of highly risk assessed parents in high conflict that may occasionally become violent, and with children open to social care because of the impact on their welfare.
Family Check Up – a brief 4-6 session intervention that reviews family communication through observing and feeding back on family activities and how people interact, followed by a family plan to improve communication.
Mentoring – a relationship based 12mnth programme for children having difficulty building or maintaining relationships; the family attend quarterly sessions to plan changes within the home and review progress. The Family Check up is offered as an alternative to, or alongside, family mentoring, for appropriate families.
Lead in the Healthy Relationship Partnership which helps other education, statutory and voluntary agencies in Hartlepool to better understand and enable healthier family relationships.

Our projects are delivered in easily accessible community venues or in the family home. A Family Support Worker completes home visits and contacts families on a weekly basis to help overcome barriers to engagement.

Current opportunities

Trustee to help drive growth supporting children in care and families

Changing Futures North East

County Durham and Tees Valley, TS240JR or Remote

Help children as Trustee of an innovative, enterprising Tees Valley Charity that is increasingly supporting children in care through fostering and...

Trustee (responsibility for fostering)

Changing Futures North East

County Durham and Tees Valley, TS240JR or Remote

Help children as Trustee of an innovative, enterprising Tees Valley Charity that is increasingly supporting children in care through fostering and...