Upstream thinking for social change

We are on a journey to understand Barnwood’s role as an agent for social change in Gloucestershire. What we are learning is that getting upstream of a problem is our best chance of making lasting change.  

In this blog, we share an example of how we have used Trust funding and influencing to get upstream of the issues for Short Breaks, one of our change programmes at Barnwood Trust.  

Moving towards long-term solutions 

We often hear from our colleagues in the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, and from disabled people, people with mental health conditions and unpaid carers accessing local services, that creating lasting change needs a new approach1. Across the system in Gloucestershire we need to move away from a culture of short-term funding and short-term problem-solving.  

There are many reasons why funders and commissioners focus on short-term fixes and short-term results. Long-term, sustainable change needs space, time and financial flexibility to be able to innovate. This isn’t often a luxury funders and commissioners can afford. And, providers of services have their work cut out as it is, trying to meet ever-growing need. This doesn’t allow much opportunity to explore solutions to long-term problems within a complex, interconnected system.  

Barnwood ‘s financial independence gives the Trust a unique opportunity to take a different approach. We can look at an issue further upstream, ‘test and learn’ what works, and generate evidence to inform and enable more lasting solutions. See our blogs ‘Funding in a changing world’ and ‘Building belonging: a people driven strategy’. 

About Short Breaks  

Barnwood’s Barriers to Short Breaks report was published in 2023. This research was co-designed with parent carers and young people. We found that Gloucestershire families were unable to access the short breaks they were looking for, for their disabled children and young people, due to:

• a lack of short breaks provision; 

• poor transport infrastructure to get to a short break; and  

• a lack of specialist short breaks staff training to support different needs.  

We also knew that the Gloucestershire County Council had unfilled commissioning contracts, and that available services were unable to meet particular needs of families. 

 

Funding for innovation 

A short-term approach to the short breaks issue could have been for Barnwood to fund more provision, targeting areas that were underserved. Whilst this would have temporarily removed barriers for some families, it would do little to resolve the causes of those barriers.  

Instead, we worked with parent-carers and young people to co-design2 the criteria for a Short Breaks Fund – for a group of VCSE short breaks providers to test innovative ways to improve access to short breaks in their local area. This would enable us to evidence new ways of doing things to other funders and providers. 

Through various projects, the Short Breaks Fund has so far led to a mobile provision in different parts of the county, the set-up of new short breaks sites, the trialling of transport provision to get to a site, and the co-design of services to be more relevant and appealing to the young people using them.  

Upstream influencing  

For long-term solutions, we are learning that it is not enough to think about how services are delivered. We also need to understand how services are designed in the first place. For short breaks, funding and commissioning briefs determine how services are resourced and, in turn, how the services are designed. By influencing how commissioning briefs come about, we might be able to influence the provision of short breaks overall. 

Barnwood Trust funding can therefore be crucial to our ability to bring innovation to the fore. Using funding in this way demonstrates a seriousness – that the Trust is willing to take the financial risk to pursue lasting solutions to complex problems. And, the hope is that we prove a concept that others can adopt.  

Partnering with Gloucestershire Children’s Services  

Since the early days of our Barriers to Short Breaks research, we have been engaging with colleagues from Gloucestershire Children’s Services about what we heard through the research and what we hoped to achieve – better access to inclusive and engaging short breaks for families of disabled children and young people across the county. Gloucestershire Children’s Services have been receptive to this, recognising that current systems are imperfect, restricting who comes forward to deliver them, and that Children’s Services have limited freedom to try something radically different. 

Over the summer, we have been working with Gloucestershire Children’s Services and Gloucestershire VCS Alliance to develop a collaboration that builds on the first phase of Barnwood’s Short Breaks Fund.  

For this partnership, Barnwood Trust will invest £1.2million over 2 years and together we will ‘test and learn’ about different ways of funding short breaks on a larger scale. This is a unique opportunity to grow our learning about how barriers to short breaks can be overcome across the county. It will also enable Barnwood, and our VCSE partners, to help redesign the Short Breaks commissioning processes with Children’s Services, for the long-term.  

You can read more about Barnwood’s partnership with Gloucestershire Children’s Services here.

What happens when Barnwood’s funding runs out? 

Providing short breaks for families of disabled children and young people is the responsibility of Gloucestershire Children’s Services. Barnwood Trust cannot step in to resource services long-term where the County Council has a statutory obligation. We therefore cannot fund short breaks activities indefinitely; the money will come to an end in April 2027.  

But, by adding the Trust’s financial resources to this work we hope to support Gloucestershire Children’s Services in trying a new approach to ensuring equitable, effective short breaks provision going forward.  

There is, of course, a risk for Barnwood Trust as a charitable foundation in investing in services that are a requirement for the County Council. We don’t know for certain what long-term change will result from this collaboration. We have confidence in the commitment of our colleagues at Gloucestershire County Council and in the value of evidencing solutions that work. So, we think that Barnwood Trust’s investment is worth it for the potential to make positive changes upstream on such an important issue. 

Barnwood Trust’s additional investment is to ensure that there is enough resource to test new ways of working across the county, co-created with children, young people and their families and to highlight the benefits of these. Barnwood is also commissioning an external evaluation of the short breaks work so far, and the test and learn project, which will also feed into the legacy of the project.  

All of this will help to inform Gloucestershire Children’s Service’s full recommissioning process to secure new short breaks contracts beginning on 1st April 2027. 

Our learning for upstream working 

As a charitable foundation, Barnwood is fortunate to be able to try different approaches to social change work; to adjust and improve as we go. Some of our learning through the short breaks project includes:  

• Building strong mutual relationships is essential to prepare for work coming down the line.  

• We recognise the value of Barnwood’s financial independence in the county, it’s also important for us to ask others how we can use this well to effect lasting change. 

• Evaluating the Trust’s role as a funder, and contributor to the system we want to improve, is an ongoing but important challenge for us (for example, our Short Breaks Fund was originally for one year and needed to be extended to get away from short-term problem-solving). 

• Working upstream to create lasting change takes time and requires patience – developing an evidence base, testing new ways of doing things and seeing the impact of changes in practice can take many years.