Tracy Harrison, CEO of Safe and Sound explains why the organisation welcomes support with staff wellbeing.

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We were delighted to be chosen to be the first organisation to successfully win funding from British Safety Council to improve and support our staff’s wellbeing.

We have been awarded up to £10,000 by the British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving campaign, as part of their initiate to help small, micro and medium-sized organisations develop a wellbeing strategy.

Funding of any kind is music to the ears of the charity sector, but why is this so important to an organisation such as ours?

First, and foremost, it comes down to the specialist nature of the work we do. We support families and children who suffer child exploitation, and this can include online grooming, sexual exploitation, trafficking, county lines, modern slavery and radicalisation.
None of these are easy subjects, and our staff are operating on the frontline, dealing with the consequences.

Over the past 20 years, Safe and Sound has developed innovative, hands-on programmes which enable children, young people, families and carers, whose lives are affected by child exploitation, to move not just to a place of safety, but to emerge unshackled and undefined by their experiences and enabled to reach their full potential.

In 2022, we supported 346 children and young people between the ages of 8 and 21 who were at risk of or affected by child exploitation (an increase from 100 pre-Covid). So, our work has literally tripled in the past three years – largely due to the increased risk and behaviours of perpetrators who target young people online.

This has meant expanding our team, and bringing in specialist support workers who have expertise and responsibilities, and who reflect the diverse nature of the young people and families who we work with.

People from communities new to the city are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. A growing number of the young people we support are also at risk of or have already been targeted by county drug gangs, a particularly complex issue. Furthermore, at least 30 per cent of the young people we support have special educational needs – requiring a particularly
specialised approach.

A significant number suffer emotional turmoil and long-term mental health issues as a result of trauma they have experienced and, unfortunately, there is an increasing mental health challenges with the young person in question and the wider family requiring our support.

We have also expanded our services to better support local communities including positive youth activities and outreach work and have built up a team of fantastic volunteers who bring energy and their own life experiences to support the work that we do.

The management team and trustees have long recognised that the expansion and complexity of our work not only require structured training and professional development for our team but that we also needed to put individuals’ wellbeing at the top of the agenda.

However, there is always a quandary for smaller charities such as ours about whether money raised through grants, donations and fundraising efforts by individual and corporate sponsors should be spent internally rather than on direct support for service users.

Regardless, I was determined that we needed to better support our amazing team who in turn work so hard to support children, young people, and their families in our local community and to clearly demonstrate to our team both of paid staff and volunteers that we take their wellbeing seriously.

It was fortuitous that I heard about and attended the British Safety Council’s series of free three-hour workshops in November last year, which were set up to help small, micro and medium organisations develop a wellbeing strategy.

It was great timing as we were looking to develop our own strategy and were thinking about how best to raise funds required to support this. As part of the British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving charitable offer, they also gave each attendee the chance to apply to receive an award to help implement the plans. And I was even more pleased when I heard that our application had been successful!

The award will enable us to implement a wide-reaching strategy to support the wellbeing of our staff, who do an incredible job in sometimes the most challenging of circumstances and we are extremely grateful to British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving campaign for its support.

We had to demonstrate that we would not only use this money in creative and imaginative ways, but also how we would measure, evaluate and track the impact of our activities carefully, that we are listening to our staff to develop its plan and that how it fits with the strategic needs of them and the charity.

With this funding in place, we are finalising plans for a range of activities include bespoke training, team building and wellbeing workshops. Furthermore, and probably most importantly, I am confident it will be sustainable through the learning that will be gained long after the funding has finished.

I would encourage other charities to check out, sign up to and support British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving campaign. And when the next series of workshops are launched later in the autumn, if you employ fewer than 500 staff, you should also sign up to attend one. They are particularly helpful for smaller organisations who may not have access to the HR and financial resources that larger ones can use to support their staff.

For more on the work of our charity, visit: www.safeandsoundgroup.org.uk

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