“Our dream is for Manchester to be an accessible city. That’s a huge dream but we’re chipping away at it” says Hayley Middleton, trusts and grants manager for Manchester-based organisation, Henshaws.
We awarded funding to Henshaws as part of an application round specifically funding projects aimed at preventing loneliness and isolation across the country. As an evidence-based funder our rounds are guided by research that we have commissioned to understand what life is like for someone with a visual impairment. This round has been guided by the findings from our research which found that 1 in 3 vision impaired people experience loneliness and isolation.
As one of our funded partners we invited Hayley and Josh, enablement officer, from the charity to lead a webinar on their latest project. Hayley shared the challenges they faced with kickstarting the project and what success looks like now, and in the future. This is a story of adapting and growing as an organisation, no matter how long you’ve been around for.
Q: Henshaws has been around for a while, are you the organisation that proves you can teach an old ‘dog’ new tricks?
Hayley: Haha, you could say so, yes. We were officially established in 1837, so we’ve been around a long time, and we’ve changed a lot as an organisation, because the world has changed a lot. We now work across nine of the Manchester boroughs, as well as run children and young people support groups in Merseyside. Each year we support around 1,000 new people. Everything we do and how we support people starts with the Pathway to Independence Model.
Q: Tell us more about this?
Hayley: The first question we always ask is: “How can we help you?” This could be over the telephone or through referrals from Manchester Royal Eye Hospital (newly diagnosed patients are automatically opted in to hear from Henshaws). Josh, one of our enablement officers, may come round and meet you in person. It’s all about creating a plan and establishing if Henshaws can support you. In the instances where Henshaws can’t support directly, it’s about finding the contacts to the organisations, nationally or locally, that can.
Q: What are the types of services that Henshaws can offer?
Josh: I do one to one sessions, where I work with someone on their personal plan. Those sessions are very much shaped by that person and what they would like and need. I can then also refer to our digital services and counsellors.
Hayley: The digital and counselling services are both very popular, as are our children’s services. We’re very proud and confident in the success of our personal plan offering, but we’d known for some time that our social offering wasn’t meeting the needs of the people we’re supporting.
Q: How did you discover that there was something missing in what you offer?
Hayley: If you’re 10 years old and you came to us wanting to do something fun and adventurous, then we have that. If you’re 70 and want to do activities such as bingo or a drop-in chat with tea, then we can offer that. But if you’re in the middle ground, none of those activities appeal to you. And all those 10-year-olds who’ve been attending these adventurous activities for several years are growing up and out of wanting to do those things. Their needs are changing as they start uni or looking for their first job. We knew we weren’t meeting people’s needs in that way, and we also knew from the phone calls we were getting that our service-users felt the same way.
Q: What happened next?
Hayley: We started a consultation process, we asked supporters on a large scale what they want/need and are struggling to find access to. The responses were so varied, from mechanics courses through to learning to play the ukelele, or simply knowing which cafes are accessible so they can go and grab a coffee with a friend.
We knew we couldn’t do it all so we looked at how we can work with mainstream and existing groups to make existing activities accessible. Josh did a lot of outreach and research into what is on offer and if they matched the requests from the consultation.
Q: What did you find out, Josh?
Josh: I had no problem finding the groups, but information about when, where, how to attend was usually hidden on a poster somewhere, that’s not particularly helpful or accessible. And people don’t know if they’re going to have a good experience if they do turn up, so that’s how our project started. We deliver Visual Impairment Awareness Training (VIAT) to these groups, then add it to a portfolio, letting the people of Greater Manchester know these groups have received training and are accessible.
Q: Were there any challenges getting this initiative off the ground?
As part of this initiative we wanted to recruit someone who could specifically work on it and be able to get out and about. Recruitment is a challenge at the moment, but after three rounds we found someone. They got off to a brilliant start making connections within the community. Unfortunately, after three months, the person had to leave due to personal circumstances.
Q: That is quite a setback, what did you do to get things going again?
Hayley: Firstly, we spoke to the funder, and we know Fight for Sight is a very supportive funder. We looked at our existing staff because starting another recruitment round is time consuming and we didn’t want to lose momentum. So, we’ve now split the project across different teams, and it feels like we’re starting to get things off the ground and building up the portfolio.
In the future in terms of a fixed term role like the one we hoped to have for this project, I’d first look at what expertise and capacity we have in the team already. We realised that our enablement officers already had the connections in place and so we could continue the momentum of the person who was in the role for three months. But next time we’ll save ourselves a good few months, and look at what we have internally.
Q: What has been a key learning from this project so far?
Hayley: Collaboration! We’ve learnt to look out for the groups that already exist, and not try and reinvent the wheel. We’ve made connections with groups which The Macular Society and Bury Blind Society run and added those to the portfolio.
Q: Tell us about a group you’ve trained up with VIAT?
Josh: This was a really great experience. Cycling UK got in touch with us asking if we can help them run accessible cycling training. They already had the adaptive bikes and ran courses, but felt they needed a bit of extra support with guiding people to use their facilities as well as the equipment. They were the first group to make it into the portfolio.
We’ve got lots more training booked in, and the portfolio is filling up. It’s great to be able to say to the VI people we work with that these activities are available, and they won’t panic when a load of blind and vision impaired people turn up to take part.
Groups have been receptive to it. Like Cycling UK many groups have the equipment but don’t feel equipped to run an accessible activity without training. For example, we’re about to train a shooting club who has acoustic shooting equipment, but nobody’s used it, it’s just sitting in a cupboard somewhere. But once they’ve received our VIAT, they can start running accessible sessions, and that’s another activity we can add to the portfolio.
Q: Recruitment has been a challenge, but what else is proving to be a challenge?
Hayley: You’re only ever training the people in the room, so we’re looking into how we can work around staff turnover. For us the worst thing that could happen is someone builds up their confidence to attend a group we’ve recommended, and they have an awful experience because the people who were trained are no longer there. We could make things worse, rather than better.
We’re very aware of that and are looking at what can be done to avoid this happening. This could be through initially training senior management (who are likely to stay in a job placement for longer) and they are equipped to trickle down the training to their staff as part of inductions.
We’ve also found that training volunteers is a great way to keep places engaged. Although volunteering is by nature flexible and can be a bit erratic, the volunteers are so eager to learn new skills, because that’s one of the reasons they’re volunteering in the first place! So, we are very keen to include volunteers, not just paid members of staff, where we can.
Q: Now that the portfolio is filling up, what’s next?
Hayley: We want to give it a few more months, but then it’s a case of analysing the data we have around people’s experiences: are people turning up, are they enjoying it, what’s stopping people attending? And how do we ensure the groups remain accessible, say if there’s staff turnover as mentioned before.
What I’d really love is for Manchester to be an accessible city, and we can get there by chipping away at it piece by piece. We can focus on one area at a time, for example The Printworks, a food and leisure area. Could we go in and train a restaurant/café at a time and before you know it the whole area is confidently accessible?
Josh: I want people to be able to go to a setting, whether it’s a leisure centre or a café, and feel normal, to not feel excluded or different.
I have a visual impairment and often when I’m speaking to someone about their personal plan, they say that I’m the first VI person they’ve met. And I always say well I can introduce you to more VI people!
And of course, the next step is for this project to be a firm feature in our Pathway to Independence Model. When we’re talking to someone about their personal plan, we can show them the portfolio and they can pick and choose activities they would like to try or have always wanted to do.
It’s a question I’ve already added: “What sorts of things are you interested in?”. Usually, they say what they’ve tried to do in the past and it hasn’t worked out, but I can now on many occasions say that I know for a fact there is an accessible group that runs that activity, because I trained them!
Q: And a final question from us: what does good look like to you and for Henshaws?
Hayley: The thing I hate to hear is “I wish I’d heard about you sooner.” That gives me goosebumps because I want to help people at the earliest opportunity, so they don’t ever reach crisis point and become entrenched in their loneliness or lack of confidence.
So, for me good is for us to be available to someone as soon as possible, at point of diagnosis for example. We can then work on a personal plan together and allow them to realise there are so many opportunities for them to do activities that bring them joy and connection, but also speak to a counsellor or learn what tech is out there.
Q: And the same question you, Josh?
Absolutely for me especially is if I’m speaking to an adult in Greater Manchester who has had a visual impairment since childhood, and they say: “I wish this existed when I was a child”. Would they be more confident as an adult if they’d had more support? So, for me prevention is so important in stopping people slipping through the gaps.
