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Engaging hard-to-reach families and children

5. Reach and engagement: project strategies

Participants described their strategies for reaching, engaging and maintaining engagement with hard-to-reach groups. These strategies can be understood in three categories:

Intervention design and practice

Responses highlight several elements of intervention design and practice, including outreach strategies, promotion, ensuring an appropriate service delivery environment (including soft entry points) and maintaining an approach to practice likely to maintain ongoing engagement. Participants described how aspects of their interventions were consciously designed to engage hard-to-reach populations.

Most Communities for Children participants referred to the inclusionary ethos underpinning the program to explain how they sought to take services to where families are, and to adapt community-based services and development activities to identified community needs. Some sites were seeking to engage hard-to-reach families by generally improving access (such as providing free, community-based activities) rather than seeking to specifically target particular groups. However, some participants articulated tensions between universal and targeted approaches underlying the Communities for Children model.

Fulfilling community or group needs

Some participants described how their reach and engagement strategies involved tailoring activities to fulfil the needs of particular groups, to ensure they were complementing rather than competing with existing services:

‘We’re not trying to compete with services already in place. We’re trying to provide unique services which complement other services but in some instances fill a void in that they’re very available, they don’t cost, they have a degree of structure but also accommodate individual needs, and give referrals to other programs.’
Participant 1

Providing services not otherwise available was particularly important for engaging men. For example, a participant from a men’s group described in more detail how the emotional safety offered by his project filled a basic need in the community not otherwise provided for:

‘There hasn’t been enough support for men going through family breakdown. The peer support group provides a safe place where men can download emotionally ... [It’s a] safe place to let steam off, debrief and connect with others. It’s a basic peer support model, for them to gain confidence to reach out for professional support.’
Participant 5

Similarly, a parenting project offered basic training in cooking to improve the eating habits of young mothers, with topics catering for their needs rather than those of older mothers, while providing a soft entry point:

‘We had a cooking day. We found some young families were just eating at Subway. We showed them how to make wraps themselves, and how to cook. They just didn’t know how. So the target topics for young parents might be quite different than for older mums who might be doing topics about child behaviour, and child development. For young mums it’s more about building confidence and support, and teaching them basic survival.’
Participant 1

Providing relevant and accessible services that fulfil community need was seen as an important element of strategies catering for hard-to-reach groups. However, while fulfilling a need is necessary, it is, on its own, unlikely to be a sufficient strategy for reaching and engaging hard-to-reach groups. Ensuring that activities that are relevant to practical needs are available is integral. This can help maintain engagement with groups who may otherwise be underrepresented, overlooked or service-resistant.

Service delivery environments

The use of soft entry points was a key strategy. This referred to offering non-stigmatising ways to engage parents in their own communities (for example, through outreach services like mobile playgroups) or through existing neutral, often universal services such as health clinics, child care centres or schools, or natural gathering places like parks or shopping centres. While one service had located in the grounds of the primary school, another project manager from a Communities for Children-funded service explained the use of other places parents might gather:

‘We use natural gathering places. A fun low-key morning where the group is given fun activities ... Creating books, adding story time.’
Site 5

Participants stressed the need for interventions to be non-threatening, indirect and informal, and to take service provision to where families gathered in the community. Strategies included providing information or recruiting clients through universal locations like maternity wards and health clinics, to residential areas through mobile playgroups, and to innovative locations, like sporting events, as a way to engage fathers. As one participant described:

‘I’ll do a workshop in a big shopping centre on a day where I know that it’s busy and lots of people will get their pension and go to do their shopping … they’ll get a free book and they’ll get their literacy materials, posters and so on, so that they don’t, you know, miss out.’
Site 6

In other areas, mobile playgroups and mobile libraries were used as strategies to engage Indigenous families and those from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, including new refugees. For CALD families in one site, a sewing group enabled women to make their own ethnic clothing, which was not available for sale locally, while providing opportunities to bond and learn about community supports and opportunities.

In several sites, activities in local parks were particularly important for engagement. These were seen as less threatening than activities in centre settings, for as one participant described it, these look like ‘just a few ladies with a bunch of toys’. Another participant stated:

‘[I] go to places where hard-to-reach families might be found. It’s thinking about, you know, they must be passing a park perhaps on their way to the shops. So we’ll do, like a, play session in a park and have all the literacy activities and materials there too.’
Site 6

Interventions based around play activities in local parks were also preferred because they were free or low cost activities which parents could replicate at home and because these are not tagged as welfare activities but nonetheless provided opportunities for workers to pass on information to support cognitive and physical development to parents as required. Activities in local parks were also preferred because these provided non-threatening ways for families new to the area to meet others. One participant described how this strategy provided a focal point in the community, while another participant explained how park-based activities provided entry points for more intensive supports:

‘… [W]e’ve got increasing numbers [of hard-to-reach families] because we provide free play days for the children and we advertise in all the areas where target families hang out… so that’s the tag to get them in the door and so the families will come just for that to start with and then think, oh well, I’m here I may as well go and get some information.’
Site 4

As well as being in universal or natural locations like parks, interventions with these soft entry points meant activities were designed to appear less stigmatising for parents. Another example is a site that sought to engage families by inviting them to a display of early learning opportunities and supports at a popular centre by providing free entry and child care. This allowed them to walk around and talk to service providers at their own pace. Playgroups, cooking courses and a walking school bus were also used to help engage parents perceived to be previously disengaged and distrustful of volunteering or service provision. In one area with new arrivals, for example, a cooking and international cuisine group incorporated nutrition, learning about Australian food, dental health information, and strategies to normalise family diets on settlement in Australia.

Similarly, in Local Answers and Invest to Grow, projects used activities like ‘play and stay’ morning teas, music and movement activities, literacy programs or immigration advice for culturally and linguistically diverse families. Free legal advice, for example, provided an entry point for engaging low-income men in supportive emotional interventions. Volunteering was another possible entry point:

‘If they don’t see themselves as interested in participating in a group we ask them to volunteer. It’s a way to get them in, get them connected. It gives them a different purpose.’
Participant 6

For fathers, one strategy was to offer programs on weekends and in the evenings to provide opportunities for involvement outside of typical working hours. However, this was considered to place additional strain on staffing resources.

For hard-to-reach young people, providing learning environments that were less restrictive than a traditional classroom environment was important to engagement:

‘A lot of it is not set in a classroom environment. It’s interactive and physically active as well. We do that just to keep them interested. It’s a reason most fall out of school, they find barriers at school like desks. The atmosphere is casual; we try to get them into education that way.’
Participant 2

Childbirth education for young people used a similar strategy of a casual environment:

‘Classes are very relaxed; we sit on the sofa or outside. It’s very chilled out and really informal, a lot of chatting ... we make sure it’s not an overload of information, and that we’re sharing information and experience. It’s not like a class setting. We have music, food on the table, it’s like ‘make yourself at home’. It’s youth friendly.’
Participant 4

Similarly, an education program for young mothers and pregnant teenagers provided an adult learning environment, engaging vulnerable young people with a comfortable, flexible program and delivery mode, making explicit allowances for the challenges of pregnancy such as morning sickness, or of sleeplessness with a newborn.

‘It’s a comfortable, flexible school environment. It’s a flexible program, so if they had a sleepless night with the baby or morning sickness it doesn’t force them into a mould.’
Participant 11

Outreach

As well as ensuring the model matched a need among hard-to-reach populations, outreach was an integral component of intervention design and practice. As one participant described, outreach was necessary and involved building up networks and trust over time:

‘... [G]oing to them, to their community rather than expecting them to integrate. It’s not culturally realistic to have a room of white women and expect an Aboriginal woman to walk in and feel comfortable. We need to go to them. But it’s taken time for us to establish networks and trust with their leadership.’
Participant 1

Specific effort on the part of services in terms of outreach and relationship building was therefore perceived as necessary for reach and engagement.

Promotion strategies

Projects also put extra thought into how to promote interventions to attract hard-to-reach groups. While one participant felt they could not promote the project as they would be unable to meet demand, others sought to advertise as much and as cheaply as possible without a strategy, with the idea of ‘getting out there however we can to let people know the service exists’. Others put more care into their strategies:

‘We promoted the project using a photo of the young pregnant women, with their pregnant bellies out proud. It looked fun, they were having a laugh. Young people think ‘it looks like me, it looks normal’. There’s the taboo of looking like you’re getting help from a charity. The girls look happy and normal and other people think it looks okay.’
Participant 4

Importantly, visual promotion was seen as the most effective strategy for accessing vulnerable families, many of whom have difficulties with literacy.

Technology

As well as visual promotion materials, some projects also used technology to reach out to potential participants, and to maintain active engagement. One had involved young fathers in the making of a DVD to engage other young fathers, while in another video technology was used to assist families with children with disabilities in remote areas. This participant described the effectiveness of technology for working with clients in very remote areas:

‘[W]hat we’re doing is extraordinary. The engagement with families is better in some cases than the engagement with city families. They religiously turn it on, even if they’re sick. They use the time really wisely … But it’s not better in all aspects. We can’t touch the kid. It’s the family who has to do everything. We explain, show them how, but ultimately it’s parents who are working with the child. It gives them so many skills; they have better interactions with the kids. We’re just teaching them how to do it.’
Participant 20

Thus technology was perceived to offer opportunities to actively engage rural and remote families, allowing for interventions that could be more effective than face-to-face services.

Food and incentives

Venues, transport and enticements like food were important to engagement strategies. Participants described trying to link into local transport timetables, especially in rural areas, where transport presented particular barriers to participation, although there was resistance to being seen as a ‘taxi service’ or families becoming dependent on transport provided by services:

‘We do some car pooling. We will, in exceptional circumstances, get people. But we don’t offer that routinely because people get too dependent on it. I’d like to be able to say we have a community minibus.’
Participant 13

Providing food or other incentives to encourage participation was particularly important:

‘When they come they get a feed. They know they’re gonna get a feed. We cook up a meal every second week, and share recipes. It’s the food, transport, the one-to-one before and during that’s really helped with engaging. And it helps that it’s voluntary. Young people like that option, they don’t come if they have to.’
Participant 4

Practice approach

Approach to practice was also deemed important for reaching and engaging hard-to-reach groups. Importantly, building up relationships with hard-to-reach groups was considered to consume more staff time and effort than with mainstream clients. Services used relationship-based, client-centred techniques to engage. As one described, this was about promoting inclusionary, strength-based environments in group interventions and across the organisation:

‘

Creating an environment that’s inclusive of difference, and different abilities. Whether it’s about lifestyle difference, cultural difference, whether it’s about ability to function, or social norms. Having a group that can address that is critical ...’
Participant 6

Client-centred practice was seen as particularly important for working with young parents. Participants described trying to understand the unique personal histories and needs of service users, and building up relationships prior to beginning group work to break down barriers and misperceptions and ensure engagement:

‘We have a one-to-one before the group starts. So for the last six weeks I’ve visited the young women once or twice a week. I also try to get the childbirth educator to meet with them. It’s incredibly daunting to go off to a group when you haven’t met someone. And we’re helping with other areas of their life. Hospital appointments, housing, which helps build up that one-to-one rapport ... Young women are nervous that we’ll take their baby, so its helpful to be able to pick them up to go for lunch one to one, so that trust is built up. It’s all about creating a good relationship before the class starts.’
Participant 4

Strength-based approaches to professional practice were perceived as a way to empower parents and maintain engagement. These approaches provide support while treating families as the experts on their own needs. For young people, an important element was that relationships were perceived as non-judgmental:

‘Being non-judgmental. In the first place, offering support that’s meaningful to the young parent. Addressing what she says are her issues, based on her definitions ... It’s communication, connection and trust. You build a positive relationship then start including educational material, and making suggestions ... I think if you’re successful in building layers and keeping connected they come back when they need it ... if we can give young mums the sense they have a meaningful contribution to make, they feel a greater sense of self worth, that “I have something to contribute, people listen to me, I feel more confident, I’m proud to be a parent”.’
Participant 10

As well as providing activities relevant to community needs, being relevant or ‘tuned in’ on a day-to-day basis was also important. Flexibility, sensitivity and service user empowerment, for example, were identified as important practice priorities by a participant in a rural project:

‘You need to be relevant to what they want. It needs to be focused on what the group wants to do. The facilitator can’t impose what you think is a good idea ... you have to be tuned in to deal with what is at the forefront of people’s minds, and flexible enough to go from one thing to another without seeing it as a bad thing … You also need to empower the group to be comfortable enough to tell you what they want. That’s easier said than done. A lot of these people are told what they should have, and aren’t used to telling us what they want.’
Participant 13

Indeed, maintaining relevance to the most vulnerable is likely to be particularly difficult where they have difficulty recognising or communicating their own needs.

Participants described how aspects of their interventions were consciously designed to engage hard-to-reach populations. Most referred to the inclusive ethos underpinning Communities for Children in explaining how they sought to take services to where families are, and to adapt community-based services and development activities to identified community needs. Some sites were seeking to engage hard-to-reach families by generally improving access (such as by providing free, community-based activities) rather than seeking to specifically target particular groups. However, some participants articulated tensions between universal and targeted approaches underlying the Communities for Children model.

Intervention design for culturally and linguistically diverse populations was a persistent issue for sites with large multicultural populations. Interventions included:

In some sites, initiatives targeted groups specifically to new migrants, such as Afghan and African women. Other examples include groups for fathers and older mothers. Interview participants described the importance of offering a range of possible entry points, for example, groups for people of mixed ethnicity as well as those specifically for Vietnamese, Arabic-speaking and other cultural groups.

In one site, strategies for engaging CALD families included, for example, interventions designed to promote reading in Vietnamese families, involving translated reading and literacy tools, and attempts to provide culturally appropriate books. In another, Communities for Children provided funds for community activities or events, which proved a successful tool for engaging people from different CALD communities, including those from Iraq, Somali, Sudan and Indigenous communities.

Overall, designing activities in ways that utilised soft entry points and opened access to the whole community of families rather than target groups was found to work well, and interviewees did not express concerns that some families may be missing out on these opportunities.

Networks and partnership

As well as designing interventions to help engage hard-to-reach groups (largely by ensuring soft entry points), participants highlighted the importance of networking and partnerships as engagement strategies. While some activities relied on word of mouth to promote their activities, others sought to engage families beyond existing networks by identifying and partnering with other organisations, through targeted local advertising, by doorknocking with local volunteers, and through interorganisational referral practices.

Networking was seen as particularly important for services seeking to engage Indigenous clients. In one site, which was helping some Indigenous clients on an individual basis, the participant felt these clients preferred specialist Indigenous services. In response, Communities for Children was trying to connect with Indigenous organisations to encourage greater links. Networking was also important for culturally diverse families. In one site, early childhood services reported attempting to engage culturally diverse families new to the community through a large employer in the area.

Communities for Children’s provision of a suite of services, and links to other community resources and services, meant that services could act as conduits to broaden individual access. Having strong networks and appropriate partner organisations to refer clients to was therefore important to extending and sustaining engagement with hard-to-reach groups. One project manager captured the idea of Facilitating Partners as catalysts for interventions in this way, stating:

‘[O]ur role is finding the service providers that we can support so they can reach those communities.’
Site 5

In that site, the Facilitating Partner was credited with a strong role in recruiting, linking and introducing both partners and families, including CALD community organisations and families. In other sites, networking with local government early childhood development workers was cited as important for integrating Communities for Children with other local services, to ensure access. Another site had found it difficult to engage fathers, finding that fathers were not comfortable sitting round a table talking. To address this, the service was seeking to collaborate with a hardware supplier to develop their intervention strategies.

Invest to Grow and Local Answers participants similarly used networks and partnerships to reach and engage hard-to-reach groups. Strategies included working with and through other agencies (including government agencies, community health, youth centres, police, schools and child care centres), establishing and coordinating referral pathways, and including community members and service users on reference groups.

Interestingly, networks and partnerships were used for a range of reasons, including to:

Consultation and partnerships were used to identify community need, for example, inviting leaders of particular communities onto boards to help determine their needs and design projects around them. Partnerships were also used to identify and reach clients. While a few projects drew on referral pathways within their organisation, others depended on referrals from other organisations, and sought to link in with other interventions. In a men’s group, for example, the service provider was networking to try to find where men initially present to services, and to develop partnerships with these organisations to provide pathways to the intervention.4 Another commented that in a remote area, local services were the only way to reach families with children with disabilities.

Others found partnerships helped heighten their legitimacy to target groups. Links to the Indigenous community meant Indigenous people saw others from their community participating:

‘We are very fortunate to have a link into the Indigenous community. Two of the Elders come here for some reading and writing stuff. The Indigenous community see the Elders here doing these things. The Elders see the young ones here, so it works well for both.’
Participant 13

Networks and partnerships also helped projects achieve their aims by building capacity in other organisations, and building linkages to services with recurrent funding. This was important in the context of lapsing funding, as services—having engaged hard-to-reach groups with SFCS 2004–2009 funding—were working to ensure continuity for their vulnerable service users. Building linkages with services that have recurrent funding emerged as a specific strategy:

‘What we’re doing increasingly is to really focus on who are the recurrently funded service providers … That’s been a valuable role to try to focus on who is there and who is there forever and who can we work with and encourage to service those communities.’
Participant 6

Staffing

As is documented in the literature (Barrett 2008; Unger, Cuevas & Woolfolk 2007), many projects employed staff who themselves were from hard-to-reach groups as part of their engagement strategy. A male youth worker, for example, was seen as enhancing services by providing a strong role model for young men. Bilingual workers who were representative of culturally and linguistically diverse communities were perceived as essential for recruiting service users from these communities. Participants most strongly believed Indigenous staff were essential for reaching Indigenous families, stating simply that:

‘Where we have Indigenous staff, we seem to attract Indigenous families. Where we don’t have Indigenous staff members, we don’t attract as many.’
Participant 19

In some cases, training and developing local people to work in programs was a deliberate staffing and capacity building strategy:

‘We’ve had a deliberate strategy to engage appropriately skilled staff from Aboriginal backgrounds ... we train local people as volunteers to work in the program, [which] gives them good training and a stepping-stone to paid employment.’
Participant 7

‘[We also provide] training [for] community members as bilingual community educators. This has a flow on, a spiral effect. We train one and they refer someone else. They end up running the group. It’s about sustainability and capacity-building. We identify someone, a community member with leadership qualities, and train them up in a range of components like domestic violence, child protection, working with groups, facilitator training.’
Participant 12

One Communities for Children service employed four ethno-specific workers to help families with medical, dental, welfare, accommodation, housing, bill paying and finances. In another area, a male student on placement was perceived to have a big impact on younger children with behavioural issues while other examples included training a member of a culturally and linguistically diverse group to educate her community about childbirth so she could act as an interpreter on birthing issues. There was also training of an Indigenous child care worker.

Another staffing strategy was to employ a liaison officer as they could help to link Communities for Children activities up with particular communities. Another site was actively seeking to develop expertise and share knowledge by organising meetings and workshops about engaging hard-to-reach families, and addressing barriers to service uptake.

Staff quality and ratios

While having project staff from the particular hard-to-reach community was seen as an important strategy, some felt it was more the approach and overall quality of practice that made a difference, rather than their membership of particular social, cultural or demographic groups. This is a point made by Forehand and Kotchick (1996), who found that it was the relationship between staff and clients that was more important for engagement than the ethnicity of the service provider. Some participants considered the practice approach and flexibility of staff to be more important than their ethnic background or community connections:

‘Staffing is very important. We have to ensure appropriate staff, that they’re non-judgmental, that they can accept the young person as an adult and treat them accordingly. And that they’re flexible, they can move with changes. That’s unusual in the workplace.’
Participant 11

Another described the importance of good staff for interpreting needs in varying cultural contexts:

‘The facilitator needs to take the pulse of the group, read what’s on their minds. This is especially the case in the Indigenous groups, it’s what they’re not saying, not what they’re saying. That’s really down to finding the right person with the right sensibility and connection to the group. You can’t teach it, they either have it or they don’t.’
Participant 13

Some participants pointed out how training, development and supervision were important for ensuring the quality of staff working with high need families, reflecting Scourfield’s (2006) argument that working with particular groups, such as men, requires specific skill sets. One project had tried to improve staff empathy and attitudes to families and children and to promote insight into the hardships they face, which they found tended to benefit untrained workers the most. Another used staff training and support to reflect upon what worked and what did not and to plan to improve practice. In some cases, however, it was particular staff that were seen as integral to program success:

‘[O]ne of the fundamental reasons why our project works is that we have the ideal person running it … She has amazing links into the local community, especially the Indigenous community.’
Participant 13

Participants at one Communities for Children site identified high staffing ratios as particularly important for engaging hard-to-reach families. Being able to work one-on-one with families who had been involved with child protection authorities was seen as particularly important. Closer attention from staff and more staff time for each family was seen as helpful for those who may not have previously accessed community services, and helped encourage them to attend other services or activities in the area.

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