The most challenging of journeys can be made easier when there is someone to walk alongside, someone who can serve as a guide and a confidante, someone with the ability to be a true mentor. For over a decade now, the team at CASE UK, who are an integral part of The BUSY Group, have been delivering a proven mentoring model designed to help people in Wales who are wanting to enter or re-enter the labour market. Their mentoring support assists them during the sometimes-daunting journey towards meaningful employment.
The origins of our approach lie in the Out of Work Service that CASE UK were commissioned to deliver by the Welsh Government in 2022 as a project funded by the European Union. The service requirements may have subtly changed over the last eleven years but the mentoring model we have evolved in that time owes much to the emphasis that was placed in the original project – on people’s lived experience of mental health conditions and on the resulting value of peer mentoring as a resource to help participants build the capacity and resilience they would need to build the futures they wanted for themselves.
To start with, applicants for our mentor roles continue to be asked to talk to us about their own relationships to mental health. Some of them bring lived experience of their own whilst others have supported family members or friends through trauma, addiction or mental health challenges. We do that because we recognise the importance of being able to bring a person-centred, trauma-informed approach to the role. That approach, underpinned by a comprehensive training and support programme, is designed to ensure that each mentor has a full appreciation of the recovery process they are enabling our participants to navigate.
Secondly, our approach to mentoring is built on the belief that relationships are key. These days, the majority of our participants are characterised at referral as ‘economically inactive’ and may include referrals from probation teams or secondary mental health services. To meet the challenges this presents, our mentors have a range of life experiences and a variety of specialisms and interests. We use the assessment process to match each referral to a mentor who can bring insights of their own into that person’s background and the community they are part of, building a trusting relationship that will enable the two of them to work together as a team.
Thirdly, we have used our decade of experience to develop and refine an innovative progression workbook that allows us to craft an individual’s personalised journey across a range of soft and hard outcomes. The workbook functions as an interactive evaluating tool, ensuring a clear set of boundaries in the relationship and enabling mentors to hold participants to account throughout their time in the programme. The process also supports the signposting of participants to clinical and professional expertise when needed or onto one of our thirty non-accredited courses to ensure people are progressing within an agreed timeframe towards their work-focused goals.
Our experience tells us that everyone’s journey on the programme will be different. That’s why our mentoring model is designed to foster individualised journeys within a framework that brings structure and drives progression. It’s an approach that has now delivered consistent success over a decade across the employment, learning and volunteering KPIs set by our Welsh Government commissioners. More importantly, it also means that the individuals being referred to us can continue to complete the journeys they have embarked on to rebuild their lives, strengthen their community connections and come to recognise employment as a positive and achievable outcome.