Why have we changed our focus from Emotional Wellbeing and Relationships to Nurturing Relationships?
When we launched our ten-year strategy on Poverty and Trauma in Autumn 2020, we committed to cycles of continuous learning and improvement. Since then, one of our four primary themes (Emotional Wellbeing and Relationships, EWR) has accounted for the majority of our expenditure. Through analysing where our funding is going and its impact, we recognised that we needed to re-focus this theme, to ensure it is more closely aligned with our Mission to prevent and reduce poverty and trauma for people and communities in Scotland.
We want to contribute to solutions which break the cycle between persistent poverty and intergenerational trauma. Specifically, this means addressing the impacts of trauma within families, and for individuals facing severe and multiple disadvantage, where a significant aggravating factor is the experience of poverty – especially where this is deep and persistent. We have refocused our previous EWR theme on Nurturing Relationships, making the connection between poverty and trauma clearer, and shifting towards funding more preventative action to maximise impact over time. We recognise that to break this cycle, while we need to prevent poverty and trauma as far as possible, we will also need to fund services which intervene at key points of crisis, as well as support recovery and restorative approaches.
What this sharper focus means...
We have had to make some difficult decisions about what we will and won’t fund. Our sharper focus on Nurturing Relationships means there are some areas of work which were previously priorities for us under EWR, which are now out of scope for funding, as follows:
- Previous priority: Mental health support which aims to reduce reliance of children and young people on crisis or clinical services.
We recognise the increasing scale of mental health issues for children and young people. However, while some of those issues are connected to experiences of poverty and trauma, it is clear to us that our funding cannot stretch to address children and young people’s mental health in general. We want to focus our funding on support for children and young people who are experiencing mental health issues connected to poverty and trauma. We believe that the most effective and sustainable types of support will be as part of holistic whole family approaches to strengthen relationships between children, young people and their caregivers. This may involve funding services which include mental health support such as counselling as part of the mix, but we will not continue to fund services which provide 1-2-1 counselling in isolation. We will fund support through this theme for care experienced young people who are not in a family setting and will continue to provide support for children and young people through Youth Work approaches, under our Education Pathways theme.
- Previous priority: Activities which empower vulnerable girls and women, including crisis support for those affected by gender-based violence.
We recognise that gender-based violence is a very significant problem of increasing concern. As with mental health, we want to focus our funding where there is a close connection with breaking the cycle between persistent poverty and intergenerational trauma. We want to fund services which address domestic and childhood abuse: to provide crisis support for women and children at the point of family breakdown; and to support recovery and restorative approaches which address the impact of childhood abuse in later life. This means we are unlikely to continue providing unrestricted funding to organisations providing broader support around gender-based violence, such as rape crisis services, but we will consider project-restricted funding for services provided by these organisations which are focused on groups experiencing poverty and intergenerational trauma.
Our rationale in refocusing has been to enable grant holders to achieve the greatest impact they can on our mission of preventing and reducing poverty in Scotland. We continue to see the importance of organisations working to address children and young people’s mental health and gender-based violence on a wider population level, but we believe four years into a ten-year strategy is the right time to strengthen alignment with our Mission on Poverty and Trauma. We recognise the impact this refocusing may have and will consider short-term ‘bridging’ funds for organisations we are currently funding under the previous EWR theme, whose work is now likely to be out of scope and whose grant is due to end soon. We will contact eligible organisations directly regarding this in the coming weeks. Due to the high demand for our funding and a resulting pressure on our budget, limited ‘bridging’ funds will be available. We would therefore encourage organisations whose funding is due to end soon and who are concerned that their work may now be out of scope to read our Nurturing Relationships guidance. If elements of their work align with our new priorities, they may be eligible to apply for project-restricted funding.
Through our EWR theme, we also awarded many smaller grants to organisations whose work is focused on addressing poverty and trauma through strengthening relationships within broader communities. While this work will not match our new Nurturing Relationships priorities, we will be launching a new community-focused fund in January 2025. Please sign up to our mailing list for more details of this when they become available.