Change can happen and when you have a room full of people with a shared ambition to #EndRoughSleeping the power lies in our hands.
We held an inspiring day last week with colleagues from Greater Manchester Housing Providers, Making Every Adult Matter (MEAM), Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust, Shelter, Great Places, The Brick, Bridges Outcomes Partnership and the Bond Board sharing learning from our programme so far and developing an action plan to implement Trauma Informed practice for the future.
The event was opened by our commissioner Sharaf Tariq of GMCA expressing thanks to all involved in the partnership for their hard work to date and highlighting the achievements of the programme, staff and participants. To date we have exceeded our initial ambition to support 287 individuals into accommodation with 311 happy and settled in their own home. She also praised the systemic changes implemented across GM highlighting a number of pilots created by the SIB: Diversion from Custody, Dual Diagnosis Practitioner, Hep C Treatment & Testing, ETE Navigation.
During the last two years of programme delivery we have learnt from the participants on our programme that every behavior is a communication. People act in a challenging way if they don’t have the language to express how they are feeling, this behaviour may have previously contributed to their ability to sustain a home and our aim is to enable individuals with complex needs to retain their new homes long after the SIB programme has been completed. The event, along with expert training from GMMHT enabled us to explore what has happened so far and work with our housing partners to support their understanding of working with individuals with complex needs and how they can adapt their policies and processes to begin working in a trauma informed way. Together we drafted an action plan for the final 12 months of the programme as this will be used to support decommission planning and ambitions for the future.
The care, passion and willingness to learn was palpable and with this level of expertise, collaboration and commitment anything is possible.
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