Resource requirements

This leaves them vulnerable to change such as a member of staff moving on and difficult to replicate and sustain. Pathway’s Care Navigator programme supports homeless people in hospital and on discharge - it can be relatively expensive to run, they told us, due to the staff support it requires but it is likely to be ‘cost-neutral to the overall economy’. Build on Belief stressed the need for an understanding about how peer-led services operate and that they can take time to set up, become established and effective. St Giles Trust noted that funding cycles can be too short-term for projects to develop and achieve benefits. When working with people with complex needs, improvements and results can take time to realise, which needs to be acknowledged.

Another resource challenge for projects that involve volunteers is actually caused by their success in achieving employment outcomes. For example, LCPT (2015) cited the retention of peer mentors and volunteers as ‘extremely challenging, often for positive reasons, with many leaving to pursue paid employment and/ or further education’ in their Intercept Dual Diagnosis Service evaluation for the Cabinet Office. They suggest arrangements to share more groups of volunteers with their partner organisations as one solution to this problem.

Involving people with lived experience in the design and delivery of services and in coproduction projects also needs to be properly resourced. The DCMS warn against one-off projects that ‘focus more on innovation and novelty than on sustained community engagement and participation’ (2017). And, as MEAM told us, setting up initiatives that cannot be maintained can massively damage trust.

Additional requirements for employing people with lived experience as peer mentors, navigators or in other positions may also be needed. The

right support needs to be available to give projects and individuals the best chance of succeeding. Support could include help getting people used to working in a professional environment, flexible approaches to working patterns, referencing, recruitment and probationary periods. CFE Research cited Shelter’s approach to peer mentors in Birmingham as an example, who allow for individual needs assessments,

Setting up, facilitating and maintaining clear structures through which people with lived experience are able to influence the design and delivery of services needs sufficient resource, in terms of both time and finance. It is important that organisations plan and budget for this, especially as the more successful the engagement becomes, the more resource it is likely to need to support it.

advice for benefits, housing or debt issues, salary advances and travel loans.

VOICES and Expert Citizens Stoke on Trent told the APPG about some of the approaches that help with their work supporting and engaging clients with multiple needs, including:

• Small caseloads to enable the intensive support

• Asset-based approaches to supporting change, persistence and advocacy through respectful challenge

• Events and training for frontline staff with content designed by those with lived experience, to improve staff knowledge, skills and service delivery

• Partnership and joint working between services and agencies, to help better decide when particular interventions are needed and who is best placed to make them

Partnership working and good communication in particular are key to ensuring the best use of resources. Such working arrangements also enable organisations and the people they work with to benefit from a range of specialised expertise. Addaction take a partnership approach to recruitment for their volunteers and the experts in volunteering - the Royal Voluntary Service – are one of their key partners. Voluntary Action Islington and Cranstoun’s substance misuse and volunteering project (2014) also successfully integrated volunteering opportunities within a