Phone a friend

What’s your idea?

A system for providing peer to peer crisis counselling for vulnerable young people via mobile phones. Phone a Friend will be a crisis helpline for vulnerable young people who want help to avoid or get out of situations where they might get caught up in criminal behaviour.

It will be manned by young people with a history of contact with the criminal justice system, who are the best placed to offer useful, appropriate advice. The training that counsellors receive and the experience of providing support will give them skills and confidence that will be useful in education or employment. There is the potential to include time volunteering as a councillor as part of a restorative justice or similar programme.

What is the problem your idea could address?

Young people who are at risk of getting caught up in the criminal justice system need support when they need it – not just during office hours or when they are a near a computer.

A telephone and text-message crisis counselling and advice service would take advantage of the one truly ubiquitous communications technology – mobile phones – to provide crisis support for young people in difficult situations.

At the same time, there are not enough opportunities for vulnerable young people to do valued, useful work and to feel like they are making a contribution. A scheme like Phone a Friend would allow ex-offenders to do something positive and prove to themselves and others that they have a valuable contribution to make.

By training them to provide crisis counselling, the project will would help them get a sense of the risk factors which might lead them into falling back into offending behaviour and help build skills and confidence which will support them in future work and life.

What’s really new about your idea?

By combining the principles of of co-production – the idea that public services work best when delivered as an equal partnership between the people who use them, trained professionals and the wider community – with the communications technology with which young people are most familiar, this has the potential to deliver support for at risk young people in a way that is both effective and empowering.

Telephone helplines are a not a new idea, but they often rely on a division between the person requesting support who is seen as being identified primarily as having a need and counsellors who are specially trained professionals.

By breaking down the distinction between the professional and the user there is the potential to create a service which is more likely to offer open, honest communication between users and counsellors. It makes it more likely that young people will want to access the service.

What kind of impact will your idea make?

The idea would have two sets of beneficiaries. The youth counsellors themselves will gain a different perspective on the causes and consequences of offending behaviour, and a sense that they have a positive contribution to make to their community. They will also gain skills and experience which can contribute towards future success in education or employment.

The phoneline users would gain access to a sympathetic voice who would be accessible at times of crisis when other forms of support are not available. The service might be particularly valuable to young people already engaged in the criminal justice system for whom the consequences of getting into trouble again might be very serious as well as to other at-risk young people.

Why might people want to commission or pay for your idea?

Using co-production techniques allows the project to serve many users with relatively little resources. Creating a whole package which included a technical system for routing calls and texts, a training programme for counsellors and branding would make it relatively easy for a potential sponsoring body to take this system ‘off the shelf’ and make it work with young people in their area.

What do you think the biggest challenge will be to making this work in practice?

Providing the counsellors with the support and training to appropriately handle difficult calls and texts.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

I was inspired by the work of financial inclusion expert Martha Lawton who observed the value of peer-councilling websites in helping people get out of destructive financial habits.

Martha identified the potential for phone-based services offering similar support to people who did not have regular internet access. This resonated to my mind with nef’s work on co-production and on the value of preventative services.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

1 – Idea is clearly defined but no work has been done so far on execution.

What can we do for you?

Taking this project live would require two stages – development and testing. Development would involve working with an engineer with experience of designing phone systems, a designer to help produce a brand for the project and someone with experience of peer counselling with  young people to design a training and support programme for counsellors.

To conduct a live test of the project would require the sponsorship of a Youth Offending Team or other organization working with vulnerable young people which would be in a position to recruit and support counsellors and promote the use of the service to other young people.

If you’re not able to take the idea onward after the weekend, would you be happy for someone else to take ownership of your idea and move it forward?

Possibly – it depends on the context.

This idea was submitted by Stephen Whitehead.

Stephen works as a Project Manager in the Democracy and Participation programme at the New Economics Foundation – researching ways for citizens to get involved in political decision making and participate in civic activity.