“At a point of need, suddenly we’re all family”

COVID case study by Andy Crosbie: Age UK Gateshead

Age UK Gateshead has been at the forefront of providing community support across Gateshead through times of coronavirus. They reinvented their organisation within seven days in order to respond to the emergent community needs. We interviewed Ian Wolstenholme, CEO of Age UK Gateshead, to try to learn what made this emergent community support possible.

Ian: “The run up to COVID was frightening for us. We had 3,000 clients all of whom were voicing fear and backing away from their normal support mechanisms. Of these, a thousand thought they were going to die from the virus.”

#1 — Embed yourself in local communities and actively reach out to them

“Most of our services operated face-to-face, so we knew we were going to have to close them. We knew that many of our vulnerable clients were going to be housebound for the foreseeable future, so we asked them, ‘What support do you think you’ll need?’ They told us: assistance with shopping, access to hot meals, prescription delivery, and social support.”

On the 22nd March, Age UKL Gateshead shut down their 78 services. On 23rd, they opened a raft of new services, focused on meeting the four needs the community had identified. They were able to be so responsive because they were already embedded in local communities, and they proactively engaged and listened to people who told them about their changing needs.

#2 — Find partners with different strengths to help you scale up

Age UK Gateshead quickly set up a phone and online referral system, where anyone could contact them if they needed help with food, prescriptions, or befriending. Gateshead Council realised they could easily plug into Age UK’s system, so they began referring demand across. Other charities also joined in, like Edberts House, FACT, and St Chads Community Project.

“Working with Edberts House has been our biggest partnership success. Now our staff do exactly the same as their staff. There are no boundaries, and we readily co-refer.”

Many of Age UK’s services have been reliant on volunteers. They went from having 147 volunteers pre-COVID to a low of about 60 volunteers, as a number needed to self-isolate. Given that their new services were very labour-intensive, they needed a significant influx of people to help make these services run.

“We were able to do this by connecting with the Gateshead Mutual Aid groups. We have trained 18 Mutual Aid coordinators to use our CRM and to match support requests with their local volunteers. Mutual Aid have plugged their list of 1000+ community volunteers into our system, enabling us to scale up to meet these heightened demands. In mid-May, our number of volunteers now stands at 2247.”

#3 — Be a generous enabler for your partners

A primary goal of partnership working should be to help make your partners stronger. Different organisations have different strengths, and if you can use these for each other’s benefit, the entire partnership is strengthened as a result.

“With FACT and St Chads, initially they came to us with particular needs that we were able to help them to meet. This has been a reintroduction to them on a level playing field. We’re all in this together, trying to support the vulnerable people in our community. We’ve even offered to help them write funding applications. And it’s clear that they have strengths we don’t, so we’re trying to learn from them.”

#4 — Don’t insist in doing things your way, but allow for variation

“We don’t insist on things being done a particular way. Our collaborative structure is about the community members, and based on difference and different needs. We provide a loose framework, but then let people make things happen in their own way. With Mutual Aid coordinators, we let them make the decisions in their local area. If they need help, we deploy a staff member to help them, but not to tell them what to do.”

Too often, we insist on consistency above all things, thinking that a standardised approach is a good approach, and vice versa. But people are different and there are typically many ways to achieve an equally good outcome. We tend to cut off problem-solving creativity by insisting on telling people how to do things.

#5 — Don’t place ‘organisational sustainability’ above ‘supporting your community’

The marketisation of the charity sector that has been going on for years has led to charities being encouraged to adopt a business mentality about ‘making the books balance.’ In this time of heightened community need, where a great number of people with previously hidden needs have suddenly stepped into the light, some charities have adapted to respond to these emergent needs while others have ‘gone dark’ to protect and preserve their organisation.

“All the charities that have suddenly ‘gone offline’ have essentially said ‘We are expendable.’ The community needs have changed, but they haven’t gone away, so our vulnerable communities have needed us to adapt. It’s the little gutsy charities that are still up and running, like St Chad’s Community Project.”

#6 — Don’t let restrictions and regulations prevent you from doing great things

Before COVID, funding and commissioning structures encouraged charities to have a silo mentality and to view one another as competitors or ‘rivals for funding’.

“Collaboration has become easier because no-one feels threatened anymore by the thought of giving away trade secrets. Feelings have shifted because needs have shifted. Now, the priority is the community. Beforehand, community and organisational sustainability were given level pegging…at best. We have been burning through our charitable reserves, which creates a tension between keeping us afloat and making a difference for our community. We’re lucky to have a very supportive Board of Trustees who have backed us through this time.”

“We were able to relax our 50+ restriction by loosely incorporating other charities into us to allow us to serve the entire population and stay within the Charity Commission’s regulations.”

“The relaxation of GDPR has helped us massively in supporting our community. Previously, it had put layers of unnecessary bureaucracy in place which often served to sour the trust between the people we’re trying to support and ourselves, preventing them from getting help.”

Across the system, we’ve seen a relaxation of red tape that has allowed many new and exciting innovations, while also allowing charities to focus more time and attention on serving the people they’re trying to help. One important question to answer is how we can keep this lighter touch going once this crisis has passed.

#7 — Don’t exclude and let communities lead the way

Previous assumptions about working structures have excluded a lot of people. If volunteering opportunities are only available 9–5, a lot of people aren’t able to get involved because they have a day job.

“We now volunteering happening seven days a week and outside of office hours. We have so many more people involved because they can get involved as and when they’re available rather than strictly on our timetable. We would simply not be able to do what we’ve done without the support of the hundreds of community volunteers who came to us through the Mutual Aid groups. If this system wasn’t working, statutory services would be on their knees.”

All of this teaches us something important about economies of scale. We tend to think of this in terms of a single large organisation being able to offer things at a lower cost than multiple smaller organisations. However, decentralised, community-based approaches scale up wonderfully, not by merging them into larger communities but by empowering more and more of them.

“A resurgence of community identity, civic pride, and a responsibility to help your neighbours: these are some of the wonderful developments that have emerged through this crisis that we need to grab hold of and not let go. At a point of need, suddenly we’re all family.”