Vicki Beere on her nine years leading Project 6

The years I have served as Project 6’s CEO has been the most challenging decade for drug and alcohol services since their inception: the changes the sector has experienced have been significant. The reorientation from harm reduction and criminal justice to recovery and abstinence, austerity and the neoliberal changes to commissioning, have decimated the ecosystem of our sector and seen scores of smaller and community-rooted organisations close.

Drug-related deaths have rocketed, and we have lost far too many people needlessly as a consequence of our outdated laws and prohibitions. In 2021 after undertaking a comprehensive review of the sector it was described as being ‘on its knees’ by the dame Carol Black and ‘not fit for purpose’.

Project 6 faced existential threats from loss of funding and potentially losing all our contracts in 2016 when we experienced a “market failure” in a commissioning process. The local health system supported us and me, and there are some individuals whom I cannot thank enough.

Subsequently, we merged two organisations into one to protect them when they could not survive, having been cut out of the treatment system by larger organisations who wanted to increase their market share. I am not sure that I ever want to hear those words used to describe delivering a service to some of the most marginalised and stigmatised people in this country, but this is the world we now live in. I thank the two outgoing chief executives of those charities who were brave enough to put their own egos aside to do the best thing for their organisations. This is a rare event. Welcoming Sheffield and Doncaster to the P6 family was a challenging but genuinely transformational experience for my leadership and for the organisation.

Despite the threats we faced, we are still here. We have grown significantly and now deliver services to over 8,000 people annually across West and South Yorkshire. We are now in a strong and sustainable financial and strategic position, providing services as part of two significant partnerships, Likewise and New Vision Bradford, while developing innovative and community-rooted services around these contracts.

Operationally, we are;

• Leading and transforming harm reduction services across Bradford and Craven
• Delivering creative and innovative services in Doncaster
• Developing new partnerships, delivering new projects from new premises in Sheffield
• Have three robust, compassionate and supportive recovery communities

We have grown considerably, which has involved developing and investing in our central services. We now have an excellent structure and team supporting our finance, people, learning, digital systems, communications, health and safety functions. I am also delighted to have been able to rebuild our learning and development team, which is delivering excellent training both internally and externally. Despite this growth, we have focused on managing and caring for our staff’s wellbeing. The Senior Leadership Team are exemplary at what they do, operating in a genuine high support, high challenge culture.

Finally, we have a clear and compassionate voice. We are one of the remaining organisations in our sector that clearly focuses on harm reduction and its roots in social justice. I am delighted to have started the work on becoming an anti-racist organisation and restructured the #ideasconference, where we challenge ourselves and others to do better. Our values shine through in everything we do.

Project 6 is starting a new chapter under a new government, and whilst the external environment remains highly difficult, there are signs of hope. This feels like the perfect time to bring my time at Project 6 to an end and hand over to our incoming Chief Executive Jo Jepson, who I hope has very many happy years at Project 6 building on the secure foundations we have built over the past decade.

Working in this sector has been hugely rewarding as well as challenging. I implore the sector to undertake more work around anti-racism, drugs policy is rooted in racism at all levels, and this feels like something that’s continually ignored. In addition to this, I hope that a new Labour government will bring some hope and stability to the sector. It is likely that this will have a very strong focus on criminal justice taking us back to policies reminiscent of the early 2000s. I would love to think that one day, drug policy could be rooted in social justice and that people could access treatment because they are valued as human beings, and therefore deserve to be supported rather than seen as a risk to be managed. In short, a system that recognises that people matter.