Senior Leadership Team:

Vicki Beere – Chief Executive

Lynn Lawson – Director of Development and Communications

Caroline Britton – Director of Operations

Shaun Rafferty – Director of People

Akram Ahmed – Director of Finance

Registered office and operational address:

11/19 Temple Street

Keighley

West Yorkshire

BD21 2AD

Bankers:

Lloyds Bank Ltd.

Leeds, LS1 1SB

Unity Trust Bank

Nine Brindleyplace

4 Oozels Square

Birmingham, B1 2HB

Charity number – 1173006

Company number – 3430925

Auditors:

BHP LLP

2 Rutland Park

Sheffield, S10 2PD

Trustees, who are also directors under company law, who served during the year and up to the date of this report were as follows:

Anthony Ball

Quentin Marris

Pam Essler

Kes Lewis

Jae Singh

Joanne Morley

Jane McGeagh

Pam Essler

Contents

CEO Introduction

Chair Introduction

Core Purpose

Our Values

Our Services

Our Outcomes & Impact

Anthony

Partners & Supporters

Finances

The Future

CEO Introduction

Vicki Beere, CEO Project 6

In my 2021 reflections I described the impact of the pandemic still being felt up to 5-10 years later, the world feeling more volatile than ever and the huge amounts of change being experienced by health and social care. 2022 feels very similar.

This has been an extremely challenging year for Project 6, coming out of the pandemic with a gradual relaxation of restrictions, which were sometimes reversed, and dealing with the impact of delivering services over 18 months of a Pandemic. We made the decision early on to maintain a slow but steady opening up of services to provide consistency and safety for the people who use our services. We aimed to get back to 80% face to face and 20% digital delivery by the middle of the year, which we achieved and have maintained.

We have experienced the impact of the global phenomenon of the “great resignation”. During this year we have built an entirely new Senior Leadership Team, and have had to manage significantly increased staff turnover across the rest of the organisation. Financially, we had to manage a series of unexpected financial circumstances, such as no market for delivering training, multiple delayed starts to projects and a series of significant redundancy costs. This has impacted our bottom line for 2021/2022. However, our ability to bring in new income and manage costs remains very effective and our reserves remain healthy.

Despite these challenges, our project delivery has remained excellent, we have continued to design, develop and deliver with partners and the people who use our services some amazing, award winning projects. We have supported really high numbers of people to make and sustain positive change to their wellbeing, despite everything the pandemic has thrown at us.

The impact or our services on people’s lives has remained impressive, despite the challenges and disadvantages that impact on the people who use our services. More on this can be seen in the impact and outcomes section.
Partnership-wise, we have designed and developed new projects in Craven, Keighley, Sheffield and Doncaster, and continue to lead and develop new partnerships across all of our areas. The new drug strategy and associated investment has provided much needed light at the end of our tunnel after 12 years of austerity for our sector, and we look forward to developing new ideas and partnerships to deliver some of this much needed work.

Finally, in 2021 we took the time to review our governance and board make up. We have recruited and inducted several new board members, increasing our board diversity in terms of race, age, LGBTQ+ and neurodiversity, and have started diversity training and a process of self review – on our way to becoming a more inclusive organisation.

Chair Introduction

Quentin Marris, Chair of the Board of Trustees

At the end of 2020/21, with widespread vaccination and falling hospitalisation rates, we had a sense that COVID-19 was on the way out. We would be able to pick up the pieces and things would go back pretty much to how they had been. How wrong we were!

Not only did Covid persist into 2021/22 but by the end of the year there was war in Europe. Inflation was soaring and energy prices were going through the roof. The final sealing of Brexit led to many Europeans leaving the UK’s job market and recruitment of experienced staff became more difficult. It was clear that the huge sums of money expended by government on tackling Covid would impact on future public spending capacity. Here was another set of challenging circumstances for the care sector in general, and Project 6 in particular, to navigate.

The thing about crises is that they can bring out the best in people. We saw it during the worst days of Covid in 2020/21 and how well Project 6 staff and managers responded. We saw the same resilience and adaptability from our people this year. They got on with it. They continued to deliver high quality services to people in need and achieved impressive results. On behalf of the Board, I congratulate them.

There were a couple of unforeseen financial hits in 2021/22, which required dipping in to organisational reserves. This showed the importance of building up and maintaining sufficient funds to deal with the unexpected. The Board keeps a tight focus on finance and Project 6 remains financially sound.
During 2020/21 the Board had reviewed its governance arrangements, which proved to compare well with other similar organisations, and this year we worked through an action plan for improvement. The new members of the Board settled into their roles and we conducted an internal review, to make sure we were carrying out our responsibilities effectively. We take very seriously our standard-bearing role in relation to the organisation’s mission and values. Finally, we were able to start holding some of our meetings face-to-face again. My thanks go to my fellow Trustees for volunteering their time and expertise and for providing excellent governance to the organisation.

2022/23 brings more of the same challenges for Project 6. As ever, we need more good people and more money, in order to do more of what we are set up to do. We are fortunate to be well-led by our tireless Chief Executive, Vicki, and her newly-enhanced and capable Senior Leadership Team. There are development opportunities on the horizon and the organisation is well placed to benefit from them.

We will carry on doing what we do well, partnering with like-minded organisations and funding providers, delivering excellent care services through a well trained and committed workforce, working to professional policies and procedures, evidencing our effectiveness and striving always to be a fair employer.
On behalf of the Board, I am delighted to present this Impact Report as evidence of why Project 6 exists and thrives.

Core Purpose

We work with people with drug and alcohol problems and experiencing multiple disadvantage. These issues don’t just impact on the individual, they also affect families and communities.

Our Core purpose therefore is:

To provide opportunities and choices for individuals, families and communities to create meaningful and sustainable change in their wellbeing.

To achieve this we deliver services in 4 key areas:

– Alcohol and Complex Needs Services

– Family Support Services including Children and Young People

– Recovery Support

– Training Services

Our Values

Our values are integral to how we do business and underpin every piece of work we undertake.

People matter

• We instil hope
• We create safe caring spaces where people can flourish
• We trust each other
• We welcome difference and treat people equally, honestly and fairly
• We recognise and stand up for people’s rights

Everyone can change

• We help people to bring about positive change in their lives
• We don’t give up when things are difficult
• We help people to help themselves

We care about doing things well

• We say what we mean and we listen to what people tell us
• If we say we are going to do something we do it
• We are always working to do things better

Headline Achievements 2021

During the last year we have moved our service to predominantly face to face, while learning from the pandemic, and have a blended offer of delivery. Headlines include:

• We continue to deal with increases in referrals and complexity to both our crisis and alcohol services
• 8062 individuals received services, 751 above our contracted target of 7311
• 7013 (87%) individuals demonstrated positive changes in one or more of our core outcome areas
• We continue to support staff to cope through a range of wellbeing initiatives
• We have developed the Pathways Service to be delivered in Wharfedale and Sheffield within the Primary Care Service
• We have developed partnership in Craven to place alcohol support within Horton Housing projects and successfully delivered Active Citizens in the Skipton Community
• We started to deliver our Skills House project, to provide support to people leaving recovery services with skills to access education and employment
• We increased our Harm Reduction offer in Keighley, providing additional support in the Needle Exchange and outreach into the community

Our Services

We work with individuals and families to achieve meaningful and sustainable impact and improve life chances.

The communities we work in have suffered disproportionately as a result of inequalities and stigma. We are proud that we have managed to meet the needs of our local communities by increasing capacity, finding resources for practical support such as food, shelter and digital inclusion, whilst continuing to develop our offer with new services. We continue to deliver a blended offer of services to meet the needs of those most vulnerable.

Alcohol and Multiple Disadvantage Services

Our Alcohol and Complex Needs Services work within primary and secondary care services and provide open door access across the whole community. They offer crisis interventions, structured alcohol treatment, health and wellness interventions and information and awareness.

Our Keighley Pathways Service is a partnership project offering open access specialist support to all the Keighley community at a time of crisis. Working with local partners, we offer support with domestic abuse, welfare advice, food poverty, health and wellbeing, mental health and substance misuse issues. Keighley Pathways Service has received 1127 visits, providing 1331 bespoke interventions. By offering the right support at the right time, we deflected people from the local health and social care services at a time when those services were under extreme pressure. 99% of people asked reported an improvement in health and wellbeing as the result of the intervention and 91% say they know where to go in the future to deal with a crisis.

MAST (Multi-Agency Support Team)
MAST was a new initiative piloted on winter pressures money to support the pressure points in the health systems, helping to reduce frequent attendance and admissions at the Emergency Department in AGH and BRI. It has now been fully funded to continue its current delivery and expand the team moving into 2022.

Project 6 coordinates VCS partners to provide specialist alcohol liaison, mental health peer support, and Frailty/Older peoples support throughout Emergency Departments, Wards and key services of Airedale General Hospital, Bradford Royal Infirmary, and out in the community. The team screened and assessed 2703 people. They also provided intensive case support for 869 of the people referred, making 897 onward referrals to access community support, to help reduce readmissions.

ASIST (Alcohol Specialist Interventions and Support Team) works in partnership with Airedale General Hospital. We worked with 77 people admitted to hospital due to alcohol related issues, supporting them from the ward back in to their homes and the community. The pandemic and restrictions meant that we were slightly below our target this year but, of those people we did see, 70% engaged in the service and went on to a positive discharge. We have received additional funding to deliver a comparable service in Bradford.

The Third Place Project
Our Third Place project works with street drinkers and some of the most vulnerable and excluded people in Keighley. Building on last year’s Covid restricted service, we have opened up our buildings, increased one to ones, groups, and included a Pathways and mental health offer. This year we have seen with 142 individuals, providing a range of harm reduction interventions, food and pathways into treatment. 85% of participants showed improvements in mental and physical health through contact with the project.

Families, Children and Young People’s Services

Our Families Services work with some of the most vulnerable families in Keighley and Sheffield. The interventions provide direct benefit to families, concerned others and grandparents/kin carers. By working with parents, children and other concerned family members, we achieve sustainable positive outcomes for the whole family. Our Fresh Start service (Sheffield) supports women who have had one or more children removed, to take time out from parenting, deal with loss and learn new skills for the future. This year the service worked with 21 mothers who have had children removed, providing over 2429 hours of contact.

In Keighley, our Family Support Service worked with 85 Concerned Others, to build skills in understanding and managing feelings, increase resilience and reduce risk. Our Maternity and Alcohol Service worked with 14 pregnant women to reduce the impact of drugs and alcohol on the unborn child.

We work with vulnerable young people to increase resilience and reduce risk, using evidence-based approaches which inspire the individuals to take more responsibility for themselves and their own actions. In Keighley, our Young Persons Resilience Service – RISE worked with 184 young people, providing weekly one to one interventions to young people experiencing mental health issues who are below the threshold for CAMHS. 80% showed an improvement in resilience.

Our Trusted Relationships service (Keighley) works in partnership with Barnardo’s, J.A.M.E.S. and YMCA to provide one to one work with young people at risk of exploitation who are referred through the Bradford C.S.E. Hub. We worked intensively with 17 young people, 81% of whom showed an improvement on the Young Persons Outcomes Star.

Recovery Services
Our vibrant recovery communities in Doncaster, Sheffield and Keighley exist as a result of the on-going support of the Big Lottery Community Fund and aim to provide long term and sustainable recovery from drug and alcohol problems. We achieve impressive results through a range of therapeutic groups, health and wellness activities, Active Citizens programmes, peer support, training and volunteering opportunities.

Over the year a total of 799 people were supported by our recovery services, with 496 being new to services. Across all three areas we have delivered 1672 groups, with a focus on the 5 Ways to Wellbeing, Increasing Skills and Recovery Capital, with 85% of people reporting improvements

Recovery services provide a pathway from the drug and alcohol treatment systems into sustainable recovery. We started a new multi-agency skills project, Skills House, to provide support for people in recovery who are furthest from the labour market and experience significant barriers to employment.

We have made significant steps to retain and build on our volunteer capacity within our Recovery Services, delivering Peer Mentor & Volunteer Training. We have had 79 active volunteers across the organisation supporting our delivery.

Waypoint Training Services

Waypoint is our social enterprise training service. We have a proven track record of delivering high-quality vocational training that promotes excellence in working with people experiencing substance use, multiple disadvantages, troubling behaviour and emotional distress. Keeping up to date with the latest evidence-based approaches for working with people, we devise innovative, interactive training courses.

Waypoint during 2021-2022

The long term impact of Covid, after 18 months of restrictions, has been significant across health and care (our main customers) and has had a significant impact on Waypoint this financial year. Challenges included organisations not prioritising training, significant recruitment challenges, a reduced and burnt out work force, continued illness and not being able to release people for training.

We also faced our own challenges internally this year with staff taking the opportunity to move on from Waypoint and take up new roles. This meant we were not able to meet our income generation targets for the year. However this has given us a great opportunity to develop our offer, both internally and externally. We undertook a full review towards the latter part of the year with a consultant, who has given us a number of recommendations to work towards. Key to these were focusing on Waypoint’s two equally important roles; firstly, to provide expert, quality psycho-educational learning to meet the needs of practitioners, volunteers, and staff in support of Project 6 as a centre of psychosocial interventions. Secondly, to ensure a well-run training enterprise that covers all costs and has a sustainable, flexible model for the future. We plan to harness the opportunities in South and West Yorkshire, deliver more training locally to our services, to maximise opportunities through partnerships and create a pool of associates (including some with lived experience) to assist us in developing a flexible business model.

Online and Blended Learning

Waypoint built on its ability to deliver both online and face to face learning and has successfully developed and delivered a number of blended learning opportunities this year. We created new content and delivered accredited training to our MAST team in Bradford and Keighley, working with a number of VCSE partners, and a considerable amount of internal training to our volunteers and peer mentors. We continued delivery of our Social Prescribing courses in the Midlands.

Internal Workforce Development

We have to enhance this considerably in the future, under the leadership of the new SLT. A organisation wide training needs analysis is underway.

Our Outcomes & Impact

‘Everyone can change’ is one of our core values – when individuals and families start to make positive changes the whole community benefits

Our core purpose is to provide opportunities and choices for individuals, families and communities to create meaningful and sustainable change in their wellbeing.

We build on the assets in our recovery communities and engage with the local community in working together to improve things for everyone.

Individuals: In our annual Satisfaction Survey – 87% of individuals reported improvements in mental health and wellbeing and 74% reported improved physical health.

Families: Drug and alcohol misuse and complex needs don’t only affect the individual user, the harm can extend to the whole family. By adopting a family-focussed approach across our services, we believe we achieve a greater impact – 67% of our service users in our annual Satisfaction Survey reported improved relationships with families and friends.

Communities: The impact of drug and alcohol misuse and complex needs on the local community can be high in terms of the cost to local services and social cohesion. We believe that by being a visible and active presence in the local community we can reduce stigma and show the positive side of recovery. 88% of our service users in our annual Satisfaction Survey felt accepted as part of the community and able to give back to their community, and 93% felt optimistic about their ability to have a positive future.

Core Outcomes
Our services, activities and interventions are designed to facilitate positive change, which leads to meaningful and sustained impact through our core outcomes.

Improved mental health and wellbeing

• 87% of individuals reported improvements in mental health and wellbeing in our annual Satisfaction Survey
• 75% of people using our ARC (Alcohol Recovery Community) project reported improvements in their mental health and wellbeing
• 80% of young people using our RISE Service reported increases in resilience

Improved physical health and wellbeing

• 74% of individuals reported improvements in physical health and wellbeing in our annual Satisfaction Survey
• 80% of people using the ARC report decreased drinking on Audit to below 8
• 95% of people using the ARC report improved physical health and wellbeing

Improved relationships with family and friends

• 85% of people using our Recovery Services report increased recovery and social capital
• 75% of young people using our Eat Well Wednesday reported improvements in relationships on the outcome rating scale
• 81% of young people in our Trusted Relationships service showed an improvement on the Family Outcome Star

Greater Community Connectedness

• 88% of people in our annual Satisfaction Survey feel more accepted as part of their community and able to give something back
• 86% of people attending the Sober Social report an increase in recovery capital
• 95% of people using our Progress Recovery Services reported feeling more connected to their communities

Improved Life Chances

• 71% of people responding to our annual Satisfaction Survey felt more optimistic about their ability to have a positive future.
• 98% of residents feel that they know where in future to go to reduce the impact of any future crisis
• 81% of the children and young people we worked with reported improvements in both mental and physical health and wellbeing

Delivering on our Values

This year we asked people who used our services how they feel about us:

• 93% feel respected and not judged
• 94% feel treated as an equal
• 90% feel that the service really believes in their ability to make changes
• 81% feel the service goes the extra mile when needed
• 87% feel that they’re learning how to help themselves

Anthony – 32 years old

Anthony has been accessing the needle exchange service at Project 6 for a few years now. I first met him when I began working at Project 6 in June 2020. He would come in around once or twice a month on average. What was notable about Anthony was his unwillingness to engage. He would pick up injecting equipment and would want to leave as soon as possible. Often, he would be wearing sunglasses making it even more difficult to talk with him. I would however, attempt to engage with him about critical issues such as overdose risk, naloxone and accessing treatment. He had divulged that he was not on a substitute medication prescription.

Anthony usually didn’t look in the best of health and it had been anecdotally reported from another service user that he had been in an overdose incident.

It is common for engagements in needle exchanges to be short: people are managing competing priorities and often have a distrust of services. It is therefore important to always be ready when an opportunity arises to help people make steps towards change.

In the last couple of months, Anthony has started to engage. Several times he has sought the assurance that the service is confidential and has started to talk about treatment. He also has asked questions about injecting practices and the dangers of going in the groin.

Anthony is now on a methadone script. He has been struggling with the transition from an initial 30mls up to the current 60mls. His goal is to stop injecting completely and feels smoking isn’t a realistic option for him. I have encouraged him to have an honest relationship with his prescriber so that the optimum level of methadone that works for him can be reached. If that is achieved then hopefully he can become more stable and start to consider how he can make further progress.

Partners & Supporters

Ethical collaboration and partnership working is central to our approach to ensuring the best outcomes for the people who use our services and our local communities.

We’d like to say thank you to our partners and stakeholders who have supported us in numerous ways. A special thanks to all our volunteers, to FareShare, Kid Acne, TJ Smith, Emma Snell, Tom Kidder and the family of Ant Allen for their support over the last year.

Our thanks to the Peter Sowerby Foundation and the Hobson Charity for their donations, that along with funding from the British Arts Council allowed us to develop Landmark, a year long project in collaboration with artists Emilie Taylor and Christopher Jarratt, sharing journeys of recovery and healing in Sheffield.

Thanks everyone who fund-raised and donated to our work. Everything we receive is used to enhance the delivery of front-line services.

Partnerships

Project 6 is embedded in many local multi-agency delivery and strategic partnerships across West and South Yorkshire and has informal partnership arrangements with the wider Voluntary and Community sector. They include;

South Yorkshire

• Sheffield Health and Social Care Trust
• Sheffield City Council
• Sheffield Hallam University
• Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust
• Voluntary Action Sheffield
• Aspire Doncaster
• Voluntary Action Doncaster
• Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council
• Well Doncaster

West Yorkshire

• Airedale NHS Foundation Trust
• Bradford NHS Foundation Trust
• Bradford Metropolitan District Council
• Bradford and Craven CCG
• The Cellar Trust
• Keighley Healthy Living
• Carers Resource
• Roshni Ghar
• HALE
• BMDC C.S.E. Hub
• Change Grow Live
• Barnardo’s
• J.A.M.E.S.
• Citizens Advice
• Bangladeshi Community Association
• Modality Partnership
• Wharfedale, Airedale & Craven Alliance (WACA)

Finances

Our results for the year show that our income has remained stable despite a challenging external environment for the sector. Even though our overall income fell, our ability to generate and win new income remained strong even in a difficult climate. However, external factors caused a delay to the start of delivery on some projects.

Our Principal funding sources were as follows:

• Partnerships including the delivery of the New Directions Substance Misuse contract and Trusted Relationships in Keighley
• Sheffield City Council
• Airedale and Wharfedale Clinical Commissioning Group
• National Lottery Community Fund

In the year we had a few unforeseen costs that were incurred which led to a rise in expenditure. The main being redundancy costs. Following investment in an organisation wide restructure commencing in September 2022, we feel we now have a staffing structure fit for purpose.

2021/22 was a difficult year with many unforeseen financial challenges presenting themselves. However this has allowed us to build our resilience and adapt to the climate. We expect that the next 5 years will be years of growth for Project 6, with the aim being to grow sustainably to protect against unforeseen costs in the future.

Plans for the Future

We are heading in to further uncertain and extremely challenging times. The cost of living crisis, without significant intervention from the government could create a health and social care crisis of a similar scale to the COVID Pandemic.

This will result in greater economic inequalities, increased structural poverty which will continue to drive the health inequalities we have been working so hard to reduce. Project 6 is considering what our response might be, locally with our communities and more strategically across the Integrated Care Systems we work within.

Linked in part to the cost of living crisis is the climate emergency we are facing, hotter summers and colder winters have a disproportionate harmful impact on the vulnerable people we support, so a key role of our business improvement team in the second part of 2022 will be to consider our response to both the cost of living crisis and our impact on the climate crisis.

There are, in our sector, some signs of a light at the end of the 12 year austerity tunnel. The new Drug Strategy brought with it an increasing 3 year investment plan, with the areas we work in being prioritised in the top 50 for funding. Whilst the process of developing any new projects has been challenging and time consuming this is still a move in the right direction. We are well positioned in the health and care systems in all of our areas to be able to influence and be involved in decision making, to ensure that this funding ends up where it needs to on the front line, and is also used to build back up the ecosystem of our sector and is invested in smaller and local charities. Levelling up has so far proved a disappointment as a significant amount is for hard infrastructure, we will be watching what happens with a new cabinet in the autumn.

To genuinely level up areas that have experienced significant under investment over 12 years of austerity requires a genuine levelling up across health and social care and is much wider than infrastructure projects.

Internally within Project 6 we are ready to face these challenges.

• Our income is stable and we have put robust systems in place to manage unexpected costs such as fuel and utilities as effectively as possible
• Our work to develop further partnerships will stand us in good stead for developing our delivery over the next couple of financial years, as demonstrated by some of our recent award-winning projects
• We aim to use new pots of the drug strategy funding to design and deliver innovative projects that support some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our society over the next 2-3 years
• Our new staffing structure, which will be in place from the 5th September, will make us fit for the future. Our now established Senior Leadership Team will start work on developing our next level of leadership – our Operational Leadership team
• We have exciting plans for a refreshed workforce development strategy, a new wellbeing plan and for Waypoint training, and an opportunity to make system change within the Changing Futures Programme in Sheffield and to develop a much needed “grow your own drugs worker” course
• We are developing a new Recovery Strategy across the organisation to align our recovery services and through evaluation will create a solid evidence base.
• Finally, we are launching a series of podcasts around tackling stigma around substance use, and these will be launched in the autumn, leading up to the return of our Recovery In the Community conference next spring

Support Us

bity.ly/P6donate

Get in Touch

www.project6.org.uk

info@project6.org.uk

01535 610180

11 – 19 Temple Street

Keighley

West Yorkshire

BD21 2AD