Building belonging: a people-driven strategy

Barnwood Trust has been creating opportunity and change for disabled people and people with mental health conditions for over 200 years. Here’s how we are building towards our vision today.

Barnwood’s Building Belonging Strategy is based on the belief that the best foundation for achieving our vision is people and relationships.

How do we make relationships? We start by keeping our ears to the ground. We meet people across the county with lived experience, and with learned knowledge and expertise, to listen to. Central to our strategy is the fact that the work we develop is motivated, influenced and shaped by disabled people and people with mental health conditions – Barnwood Circle members inform, guide and critique what we do.

We keep abreast of national research and policy. We don’t set ourselves up as the experts, but we use our resources to fund and influence change that is needed. Barnwood’s history means that we’re able to use our long-standing financial independence to do this.

We take our time to ensure that we work out a course of action on an issue, based on what we’ve heard and understood, trying and testing ideas for making change through funding and influencing. The actions we take are always in collaboration with others and often co-designed with Barnwood Circle members.

We also base what we do and how we act on a ‘social model of disability’, aiming to address the barriers people have told us about, working from people’s strengths, skills, passions and expertise.

Actions we are taking

Firstly, the Trust provides funding – for organisations and groups who work alongside, create opportunities for, and are passionate about creating positive change related to disability and mental health. We also provide funding for individual disabled people and people with mental health conditions through our community partners. In these cases, funding is responsive to whatever organisations and individuals need.

Secondly, we use our independence to influence. We do this by bringing people together to explore an issue and to find and share solutions. We contribute our learning too in this process, and offer something like specific Themed Funding, or a collaborative learning or networking opportunity, to catalyse a change in thinking or practice.

The  change themes we are working on currently are employment, digital inclusion, provision of short breaks and access to the natural world. These themes came from our listening during and after the pandemic about barriers being experienced by disabled people and people with mental health conditions.

We are approaching these change themes in one of two ways:

1. We have created a learning programme and network – one group for employers and another group for providers of natural spaces, each to understand how to reduce barriers experienced by disabled people and people with mental health conditions.
2. We provide funding and a network – one group for short breaks providers for disabled children and families and another group for providers of digital inclusion, each with a chance to share practice so that we can maximise the learning from these programmes.

We evaluate our actions in each of these themes so that we can test, learn, and build on the experience gained. From this, we can explore what works and learn from what didn’t work so well. We write reports and share our evidence about this to influence wider change. By passing our learning on, we hope to influence shifts in policy and practice for the better.

Each year, based on what we have heard, we have a process for identifying new change themes we should consider. And we test these with Barnwood Circle members.

Learning for Barnwood 

We are constantly learning about how to do this work. We are learning how to ensure that our internal practices for removing barriers and promoting anti-oppressive behaviours reflect those practices we are working to enable externally. See our blog ‘Our diversity, equity, and inclusion journey’. It’s challenging, and we make mistakes; ideas may misfire or not take off, and initiatives can have unintended consequences.

One example is delivering funding in a transparent, equitable and timely manner. This is not easy when the demand outstrips the budget. Changing how and what we fund can be disruptive, but the changes we make are in service of making our funding simpler to access and easier to use. The take up of, and enthusiasm for, ideas for removing barriers has been so encouraging, but keeping up with the demand can be challenging. We are also committed to learning alongside Funded Partners and to taking a co-design approach wherever possible, both of which take time.

But these are great challenges to have, and we love to hear from anyone who is passionate about helping us to achieve our vision. It may take time to find a way, but if a change is worth pursuing, it’s worth approaching in a considered and thoughtful way to enable lasting impact. That is OK with us – we are here for the long haul.