"The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love." Bruce Perry

At Staf we believe that in order to create meaningful, lasting change we must act on what we hear young people and practitioners telling us both about their experiences and where they think improvements can be made.

Our experience has taught us that to achieve this we must meet and engage with young people where they are and enable them to feel comfortable sharing the parts of their lives which they are proud of as well as the parts which we all wish they hadn’t experienced.  We must also enable the voice of the practitioner to sit alongside this as key to understanding what change is necessary to enable relationships to flourish.

Thanks to funding from Life Changes Trust and The Esmee Fairbairn Foundation 2019 sees us embark on 3 new projects.

• Youth Justice Participation Project
• Project Return
• Relationships Benchmarking Toolkit

Although very different in their focus one word brings all this work together; relationships.

Building healthy relationships with our young people in order that they can thrive is the cornerstone of the work that we do, and the investment given to us by funders will allow us to develop this area of work with and for you.

We will work in partnership with the Centre for Youth Criminal Justice to further understand, amplify and give real weight to the voices of young people with experience of both the looked after and the justice system. This three-year project will use creative ways to enable young people to both explore and share their experiences with policymakers, managers and the Scottish Government.

2019 sees the launch of Project Return, a three-year project which will bring together young people and practitioners to aid our understanding of trauma and trauma-informed practice, creating opportunities for exploration of the supportive environments we know are required to support recovery and the development of relationships.

Finally, January sees the start of a new three-year project to develop and embed a tool which is co-designed by young people and practitioners which supports the development of relationships and allows services to demonstrate and understand the power and impact these relationships have for care experienced young people.

For more information on this work please contact Pamela Graham.