CB4ward: A different kind of support system, creating space for families to find their own way forward.

Juliet Snell shares her experience of leading this new way of working as a system, with families.

"Our welfare state might still catch us when we fall, but it cannot help us take flight."

Hilary Cottam, Radical Help

In 2023, a group of charities who work in Cambridge opened a conversation about how they might think and work differently. Each of the organisations work with families in the CB4 postcode, an area of Cambridge with huge inequalities, where many face financial stressors that affect their relationships and impact on wellbeing, health and education. Blue Smile, Cambridge Acorn Project, The Red Hen Project and CPSL Mind, were aware that for many families of primary age children, the way services operated was not helping, and in some cases, was harmful. Too many families were being held in perpetual cycles of short term, siloed and crisis driven interventions that close too soon, or worse, fail to “stick”.  

With funding from Cambridgeshire Public Health, Fullscope joined this group of local organisations to hold a space to explore, test and learn.

“We wanted to consider how collaboration might create better opportunities for the families they were working with in CB4.”

Together, we developed a framework, with a set of core principles, processes and underpinning practices to guide the CB4ward project as it developed:

Radical Help

Even as I joined the project, the group was already heavily influenced (as is Fullscope more broadly), by the thinking of Hilary Cottam. In Radical Help, Cottam critiques the welfare state's focus on managing needs rather than fostering individual capabilities. She notes that current welfare services often fail to empower individuals, concentrating instead on their ‘deficiencies’.

Cottam argues that welfare services treat individuals as passive recipients of aid, for which they must prove their vulnerabilities, rather than active participants in shaping their own positive and uplifting futures. Cottam advocates for a new approach based on human relationships, collaboration, and trust, where support systems are designed around people's strengths and aspirations.

Learning from Cottam, CB4ward began to experiment.

After clarifying our overall approach and underpinning principles as set out above, we focused our attention on listening to the community of parents in CB4. We heard about families’ perceptions of “safe” or “unsafe” community, how barriers stood in their way, and how services perpetually let them down, abandoned them or missed the point.

In the next part of this blog series, I’ll describe what started to happen.

Juliet Snell is Associate Consultant at Fullscope and founder of Cambridge based consultancy, taproot.

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