THE SHiFT WAY
Breaking Cycles
SHiFT is scaling high impact ‘insider-outsider’ Practices across the UK, using the Breaking Cycles ingredients, a dynamic and evidenced approach to enabling change, created by Sophie Humphreys OBE.
Using the Breaking Cycles ingredients, SHiFT wants every child and young person caught up in, or at risk of, crime, to have one intensive, high-quality, trusting, and persistent professional relationship through which most of their needs are met: a flexible, tailored, and tenacious relationship through which professionals do whatever it takes to set children and young people up for safe and bright futures.
© Sophie Humphreys OBE
SHiFT uses the Breaking Cycles ingredients to inform all aspects of its systemic, anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice.
Systemic ideas
Mean that SHiFT looks to create opportunity for change by taking a curious, non-judgmental position, considering relationships, context and the power of stories. We think about ourselves in the work, holding multiple ideas tentatively about what might be happening for children and families.
Anti-racist practice
SHiFT is committed to the elimination of racial discrimination that harms the Black, Brown and Mixed Heritage children and families we work with. We invest in allyship training and collaborate with critical friends to develop and uphold anti-racist practice at all levels, from leadership to daily interactions with children and families.
Anti-oppressive practice
SHiFT thinks carefully about the use and experience of power and we acknowledge the impact of marginalisation on the children and families we get alongside. We take ethical approaches, advocating and aiming high for families to achieve exceptional outcomes.
“SHiFT are the only ones who actually kind of got in with the family, stuck with the family. The children don’t engage very well with professionals or anyone else at all, but they absolutely love [their Guide]. Same with Mum, she doesn’t like many professionals, but she loved them. ”
SHiFT Guides:
Start with aspiration, and together we set that bar high. We do not define children by their problems or behaviour. Where children have caused harm we support them to take accountability, while also building their self-worth.
Support children and young people to change their perceptions of themselvesand to challenge others’ perceptions of them. We believe in children so that they may believe in themselves.
Reach children and young people and stay with them wherever they are and wherever they go. We are not constrained by artificial barriers such as age limits, service thresholds or Host Organisation borders.
Support each child and young person through points of transition from childhood to adulthood, custody to community, from being out of education to getting back to school or work. There is no cliff edge at 18.
See children and young people as part of families and communities and work with everyone in their world, including especially other professionals, seeking to understand and create sustainable positive change in relationships.
Work with professionals across boundaries to ensure all children have equal access to consistently high-quality support and services. We support practitioners, managers and funders across agencies and services to ensure local, regional and national systems are purposed and structured to properly meet even the most complex needs.
“It didn’t feel like I was with someone who was a worker, it just felt like I was with someone I could trust.”