AIR Network is celebrating its 17th birthday this year. Since its early beginnings as a small Redbridge football programme supporting NHS Patients back into the community, it’s been on an amazing journey. One that has seen it travel the world, work across all London Boroughs, engage over 16,000 individuals, house over 400 service users, support over 4000 into ETE (employment, training and education), deliver over 200,000 telephone and 65,000 face to face mentoring sessions and develop its own innovative approach to custody and community mentoring. Not to mention it’s played the odd game of football here and there.
AIR Network at a grass roots level is a motivational mentoring programme which uses honest, relevant and trusting relationships to support vulnerable and at-risk individuals to both plan, achieve and ultimately succeed in areas of their lives. On average we work with 750-900 hard to reach, vulnerable and at-risk individuals each year. Our approach, known affectionately as the AIR WAY within AIR Network, is both simple and complex at the same time. It is simple in its overriding vision to help each individual undertake things that are important to them, and complex in figuring out just how to do this for each individual.
The AIR Way approach has been the product of many years of trial and error, learning, partnerships and service user focus groups. Over the past 17 years we have set aside and adopted both traditional and more radical ideas and approaches resulting in our own experience informed model. We have delivered school education and football services and researched sports approaches with young people in Thailand, supported adult Homeless projects and street outreach services in Milan, visited gang violence programmes in Stockholm and Scotland and worked with sports education programmes in Miami and Malta. Every bit of this experience and learning has contributed to our approach and focus and purpose. The recurring three messages repeated by service users throughout all our learning have been safety, security and hope.
Fundamentally, our approach is not to adopt a set programme or single method or system. It’s simply built upon what most of us take for granted in our lives - the inclusion of positive and honest, non-judgemental relationships. This is something, that experience has shown, many of our service users do not have.
Our mentoring starts with our staff, getting the right people in place is critical, even more so than the extensive training we provide. For us it’s all about the 3 R’S, Relationship, Relevance and Relatability which is something very difficult to simply teach. In recognition of this, we recruit our mentors from the areas we deliver in; it’s key that the mentor understands the area, knows the local hang outs and hot spots, knows the local issues, the local gangs, understands the music, fashion and pressures young people face and yet is simultaneously aware of the needs of society, family, communities and authorities. As a consequence, our mentors are very often a complimentary bridge between statutory services and young people. An integral part of our programme involves the progression of service users into volunteers and paid mentors. This helps ensurse that we as an organisation remain relevant to the needs of our service suers by frontline shaping of services but also maintains our focus on remaining relevant to current and future service users.
The right mentors of course need the right training and the sight support, At AIR this includes an intensive induction covering motivational interviewing, inclusivity, trauma aware approaches, safeguarding, understanding the need for gender informed interventions, psycho-maturity level assessment training, caseworking and traditional mentoring approaches; ice breaking, first approaches, and developing first impressions.
So, after all of that, what does AIR actual do on the ground? Well, we deliver a range of mentoring-based violence reduction, youth engagement, wellbeing and gang exit programmes across all London Boroughs. We work with individuals from the age of 8 up to 60, supporting young people leaving care, young people in alternative education provision, adult offenders in custody, through the gate and post release into community programmes. Our delivery is by necessity flexible, delivered at times and places when its needed, often in the evenings and weekends and regularly involving instances of trauma, emergency call outs and engagements in family homes, school, prison, courts, police pick-ups, probation offices and local authority safeguarding reviews.
We provide a wide range of direct and outcome-based support, depending on the needs, current experience and age of the individual. For adult individuals in our Lambeth violence reduction and reducing offending programme this can include outcome-based services such as pre-release support in prison, sourcing and/or providing housing, setting up bank accounts, sorting benefits, arranging substance misuse treatment referrals, registering with a GP and providing ETE support and opportunities. It also includes support for personal wellbeing, behaviour change, developing human and social capital, key interpersonal, coping and life skills, family involvement and reconciliation as well as looking at preventative approaches, development of non-offending identities and impact of crime on self and society. The underlying inspiration for AIR’s violence reduction approach was the pioneering public health approach to violence reduction adopted by the Glasgow violence reduction unit.
Our violence reduction and gangs programmes in Brent, Barnet and Havering involves engaging and mentoring with young people aged 8 -25 both known and unknown to the police and Local Authority. This includes street outreach, sports and fitness provision, school support, trauma informed one to one mentoring, family involvement, gang exit support, out of hours support, education programmes within schools for parents, teachers and pupils. Mentors, recruited from the local area focus primarily on personal and community safety, family mediation and pro-social modelling, development of coping skills and resilience and development of age and experience relevant human and social capital.
All of our programmes both rely on and have a deliberate collaborative approach; health, education, policing and justice partnerships are key partners, funders, stakeholders and referral partners in all of our programmes and must always be so. Clear communication routes, Information sharing, best practice, safeguarding and honest and current intelligence sharing underpin our work and the success of both our service users and AIR Network interventions.
Stakeholder involvement, transparency of approach/delivery and development of cross organisational staffing relationships is a key component of the AIR WAY. We do this in typical ways such as attending stakeholder staff meetings, professional case reviews, safeguarding meetings, programme promotion events and regular marketing drops. We also invest in regular large scale stakeholder events involving 200-300 service users, partner staff and funders such as sports day events in Thameside prison, world cup events at England’s St George training centre and our upcoming fun day on Wednesday 31st July; both a celebration and recognition of our service users, partners and funders. The event also provides the opportunity to meet staff, observe and participate in our sports and wellbeing events and see service users engaged in fun and healthy activity.
If you would be interested in learning more about AIR Network, would like to attend our upcoming event or would be interested in working with us, please contact a member of our Management team at stevehoy@airnetwork.co.uk or marlon@airnetwork.co.uk.
Steven Hoy (He/Him)
Chief Operating Officer, AIR Network
www.airnetwork.co.uk
