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Engaging hard-to-reach families and children

6. Challenges of engaging hard-to-reach groups

Interviewees described some significant challenges to engaging hard-to-reach communities despite the strategies they had in place to reach and engage their target groups. Challenges related to:

Client characteristics and needs

Identifying clients

Some participants faced initial challenges simply in identifying clients and making initial contact with hard-to-reach groups. One, for example, explained the need for more evidence about where to find the target group:

‘[W]e’re trying to get clear about where men initially present. Do they present at Centrelink, the Salvos, or do they turn up without accommodation. Where are the first points of call?’
Participant 5

In terms of client characteristics, interview participants across the sites identified Indigenous families and children as per sistently hard to identify, reach and engage despite the specific strategies they employed.

In one site, a Communities for Children activity based on supported playgroups found Indigenous families attended when groups were initially set up but did not sustain this as the activity became more structured. Building capacity with Indigenous families was perceived as particularly challenging given the staffing, money and time required to build and sustain engagement.

Culturally and linguistically diverse groups who were new in some areas were also seen as very isolated and hard-to-reach. Literacy was a further factor identified as making some families hard-to-reach, as this meant conventional means of recruiting participants, such as using flyers, did not work well by themselves. As well as access to information, interventions for children with illiterate parents also needed to be more intensive:

‘Parents who are poor readers, or who have grown up in an environment where literacy is irrelevant, don’t consider books to be a part of life. They don’t read themselves so they don’t see the need. Poverty makes buying books a little more difficult but not impossible … The only time they read is to get themselves by with the paperwork that comes through the mail and bills. I wouldn’t say they were completely illiterate but close to it.’
Site 7

The invisibility of immigrant groups in a rural area also presented identification challenges:

‘We’re trying to get out to immigrant groups, but it’s really hard to reach those people. They’re almost all, if not all of them out of town, on single properties … when they’re isolated it’s difficult.’
Participant 13

While some target groups are of course dispersed or ‘hidden’ populations, it is imperative that services be equipped to overcome this challenge, as identifying and making contact with clients is a basic prerequisite for engagement.

Client needs and circumstances

Other interviewees were able to identify and make contact with hard-to-reach groups, but identified clients’ needs and circumstances as challenges to engagement. Interviewees recognised that hard-to-reach clients needed help to meet some very basic needs. These service providers saw themselves as needing to work from their clients’ level, with extra inputs of staff and service time required to reach and engage clients who were extremely disconnected or in complex circumstances. This included young people unaccustomed to routine and those experiencing family breakdown, who were deemed to have particularly unreliable program attendance and patterns of engagement. The complexity of needs among young parents was perceived to present particular challenges, with participants explaining that some very basic material and emotional needs had to be met before parenting support interventions were deemed possible:

‘There are so many challenges to engaging this group. These young people are homeless, or living with family violence, a huge minority have been victims of child sexual abuse. So they’re disengaged from so much in their lives. To access a support service is so hard if you haven’t slept properly or eaten that day. It’s hard to step outside that cycle. And also feeling like you won’t be judged, like it’s a safe place to be yourself … A lot of our young mothers get worried about children experiencing things they did like violence, abuse, so there’s a lot of avoidance about the state of being pregnant.’
Participant 3

Indeed the adversities faced by some clients, such as family breakdown, were seen as particular challenges that services must contend with, as the complexity of need detracts from services’ ability to intervene as planned in some cases. The extent of adversity presented challenges for engaging some CALD groups, especially refugees, where layers of high level need caused service providers to call into question some basic assumptions about their engagement strategies:

‘We found that some of the more high needs groups, their needs were quite large ... It was difficult in terms of trying to find a way to equip them and build on their skills base. Many were widows with children. There were hurdles in relation to language … and in terms of suspended education due to two decades of war … and being a woman on their own from a Muslim background without a man to accompany them. So cultural challenges around that …’
Participant 12

In some cases, the behaviours of clients in adverse social circumstances were considered by participants to contribute to the challenges of engagement, and could be frustrating for service providers:

‘Challenges include social habits, drug taking and stuff like that. Falling into a way that it’s their lifestyle. It becomes difficult when they’re not willing to engage.’
Participant 2

Indeed, drugs, alcohol, domestic violence and a lack of engagement in family life were seen as particular challenges when it came to engaging men, and were perceived in some cases to contribute to service resistance:

‘A lot of the men are using drugs and alcohol, are unemployed, and are suspicious of groups like this. There’s a lot of jealousy about what happens in the group. A lot of the men aren’t engaged in their fathering, let alone coming to the service.’
Participant 3

Resistance to services could be extremely frustrating for service providers:

‘They don’t seem to commit themselves to visiting. They agree then they’re not there when you turn up. They’ve forgotten or they don’t let you know they can’t make it. Or they tell you they enjoyed it but then they don’t answer their mobile because they don’t recognise the number. There are privacy issues. They’re wary of professionals going into their environment; they feel they could be exposed. Or if they’re in relationships and saying they’re living separately to get a better pension. They’ve got a lot to hide.’
Participant 18

However, while individual attitudes and willingness to engage with services were perceived as challenges for providers—as documented in such previous literature as McCurdy and Daro (2001)—participants expressed more frustration with the complexity of social need than with individual characteristics or attitudes.

Overall, the challenges relating to client circumstances and client needs underscore the importance of ensuring services have both demonstrated experience with hard-to-reach groups and can anticipate their needs and circumstances. They also need to build the flexibility into their strategies to effectively adapt practices as the complexity of sometimes hidden needs become apparent.

Perceptions and stigma

Several participants considered social stigma and individual perceptions, or the taboo of appearing to require help from a charity, to hamper service engagement. A participant from a project seeking to support parents with a learning difficulty felt there were particular perceptions among professionals that parents with learning difficulties cannot or should not parent, which hampered their attempts to work with other agencies to engage and support them. Stigmatisation of teenage parenting was also perceived as a challenge to reach and engagement, making it more difficult for young people to make the first step of seeking support. Perceptions around appropriate roles and behaviours also presented issues for services attempting to engage men:

‘The challenges are all that Australian male ocker peer pressure stuff. It’s about what’s cool and not cool, and role modelling, about the breadwinner models they got from their dads.’
Participant 1

‘Engaging young men is hard to do. In our experience it’s such a challenging time. They feel isolated from the pregnancy, from the birth, and from being a parent. There’s a perception that the service is a place for young women, that they’re doing girly things.’
Participant 3

Offering services in ways that break down stereotypes and stigma for clients and hard-to-reach communities is therefore integral to effective engagement strategies.

Resources and transport

Access to transport was seen to present challenges to engagement, especially for pregnant women or mothers, and those with more than one child or in rural areas, who may have bus services only a couple of days a week. In other sites, juggling prams, babies, toddlers and bags would deter some mothers from attending activities, especially in wet weather. The complexity of family life for target groups also enhanced their need for transport, with a need for activities to be located within pram pushing distance identified, as was a principle of Sure Start in the United Kingdom (see Garbers et al. 2006):

‘The idea of getting on a bus is not appealing if you’re pregnant. That’s automatically a barrier.’
Participant 4

‘Families say yes they want the group but it’s hard to get them there. Getting out of the house to attend the group is challenging because so much is going on in their lives ... say they’ve got a few kids under 5, and no transport. Transport is a major issue. We need to make things within pram walking distance to people we want to attract.’
Participant 19

In sites containing rural and remote populations, not being able to provide transport to service users was a major barrier to success, especially for Indigenous groups. Safe transport was cited as a particular issue, as was a lack of community transport, or a lack of vehicles with child restraints. As a participant pointed out, Communities for Children funds were not available for capital purchases, but buying a van or minibus would have helped overcome transport barriers for prospective service users.

Other resources also made it challenging to engage hard-to-reach groups, such as providing special equipment for children with disabilities. Keeping activities free was a priority. One participant pointed out that the cost of providing services to the most vulnerable groups of mothers, such as those suffering pre or postnatal depression, was not a sustainable activity because of the cost. Location was also a challenge. In one site, for example, many Communities for Children activities were held in neighbourhood houses, which some participants felt may have caused some potential service users to self-exclude, as these were perceived as Christian meeting places for older people.

Staffing and volunteers

Not having enough staff limited the extent to which agencies could seek to engage hard-to-reach groups, and having a rapid turnover of staff, especially in Facilitating Partners, was identified as making it difficult to build up trust with communities. Continuity of staffing in a Facilitating Partner was seen as positive, especially in remote areas. Service delivery was also disrupted where there were shortages of workers, especially in regional areas. Volunteers were also seen as integral to engaging hard-to-reach groups. In one area, a high turnover of volunteers was cited as a factor constraining the capacity of services to engage families. In this site, young mothers had been active volunteers, but were now required by Centrelink to seek paid work.

Not being able to recruit Indigenous workers also presented particular challenges to engaging Aboriginal clients:

‘For the Indigenous community, it’s hard to bring them into a whitefella type of service. We don’t have an outreach or Aboriginal liaison officer. Which is a big fall down. And they’re hard-to-reach geographically as well as culturally.’
Participant 16

Recruitment and retention of frontline staff were major challenges that directly impeded the capacity of service providers to engage and build relationships with hard-to-reach groups. This was seen as a problem not only in participants’ organisations themselves but also more broadly in partner organisations and throughout the sector, especially outside the metropolitan areas:

‘Resources are always tight for regional communities. With the long distance travel, staff burn out ... Staff retention is a challenge. People are moving around. It’s a problem in our service and across the whole sector. Because of the short-term contracts linked to funding. And salaries, we can’t compete with government salaries.’
Participant 19

Staff retention emerged as more challenging in rural areas, especially where staff needed to spend large amounts of time travelling. This was a particular problem where services invested in training staff who subsequently left, draining projects of necessary expertise. Staffing difficulties were also most intense when it came to recruiting staff with the specialist skills to engage hard-to-reach groups, including Indigenous people, men and CALD communities. Again, recruiting specialists with community development knowledge was more of a problem in regional areas despite strategies like raising the salaries on offer:

‘It’s a challenge. We’ve tried, with the salary we’ve put up. And we’ve gone through all the networks ... The person doesn’t have to be Indigenous. We just need someone with a community health, nutrition background who knows how communities tick ... We need more expertise state-wide.’
Participant 7

Recruiting and retaining staff with the appropriate skills base for setting up an environment of safety and inclusiveness for vulnerable service users was also important. Untrained workers were perceived to need extra inputs to ensure they could work with vulnerable families with empathy and acceptance. For one project with a large volunteer base, providing training to ensure volunteers had a common skills base and shared values was challenging.

Projects were, however, doing their best to ensure staffing difficulties didn’t impact adversely on the quality of services to clients. Relationships with other services and established referral paths were particularly important to mitigating the disruption of understaffing in projects. However, staffing problems in other parts of the sector, such as among child protection workers, could also hamper projects’ attempts to fulfil their goals, especially where projects were premised on collaboration and partnership.

Time

Time was a particular barrier to engaging hard-to-reach groups. Participants explained that extra time was required to build familiarity, rapport and trust with vulnerable groups, including young mothers and Indigenous families. Many participants felt Communities for Children’s timeframe was not adequate to effectively engage hard-to-reach groups, given the time required to establish new services and partnerships:

‘We’ve not as yet engaged with the Aboriginal community ... but if we’re going to do that it’s going to take a concentration of resources in order to achieve it and it’s probably not realistic over an 18 month period to do that and it was never a primary focus of the project. And so we need to be realistic in terms of what is achievable in the timeframe.’
Site 4

Problems of building trust with families in a short timeframe were seen as compounded by a lack of confidence in short-term interventions.

Time was important in two ways: in terms of having enough to spend engaging hard-to-reach groups, and in terms of the appropriateness of scheduling. In the first sense, participants pointed out that building trust and relationships with hard-to-reach groups tends to be a slow process, and services need to be in for the long haul to make engagement worthwhile. Compared with services to the mainstream population, extra time was seen as necessary to build rapport with hard-to-reach populations, especially with Indigenous groups and young people:

‘Shorter timeframes are more challenging in terms of engaging clients. If we had longer we would be better able to engage them. You need to build up knowledge and trust. And to get on with other service providers. Trust with service providers is about being there for the long haul. Especially for more vulnerable, marginalised people. They don’t want to open up if you’re not gonna be around.’
Participant 6

‘Relationships are what engage hard-to-reach people. With Indigenous communities, trust and rapport takes a very long time, around 12 months to 2 years. You have to keep at it. It’s the same with young clients. You have to get their trust so they don’t feel they’re being observed to be criticised. You have to break down their defences.’
Participant 1

Program funding thus needs to recognise the time required for successful relationship building with hard-to-reach groups, and program sustainability is particularly important for some target groups. Lack of ongoing support could provide disincentives to engagement, suggesting that longer-term programs may be more appropriate for addressing the complex needs of hard-to-reach groups.

Time was also important in terms of when services were available, especially for employed fathers and those in rural areas:

‘Dads can’t access parenting groups. We work between 9 and 3 and I think across the board it’s still there in regional areas, that we live in a much more traditional way of things working. Unemployment is high, mums are home with the kids, work is very labour intensive and men are doing it. So it’s hard for services to access dads.’
Participant 16

Some projects were responding to the difficulties of engaging working fathers by adapting their scheduling to provide parenting support sessions in the evening.

Initiative design and targeting

Program design could present challenges to engaging hard-to-reach groups, with reflecting flexibility and adaptability imperative. One interview identified cultural assumptions underpinning programs as a challenge, drawing attention to how basic concepts like ‘parenting’ may differ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts; that direct methods of training may not be universally effective; and that knowledge needs to be appropriate to specific community priorities. For group work, getting the mix of people and the dynamic right were also challenges to ensuring the group cohesion necessary for effective engagement:

‘We want to get them together to support each other. If they [young mothers] come into a group with mature women, they’re hard to engage. It’s like a splinter group.’
Participant 1

Partnership and collaboration

Partnerships within Communities for Children were seen as critical challenges to engaging hard-to-reach families. Engagement relied on good relationships between Facilitating Partners and services, but productive relationships were not necessarily assured under the model. Some found challenges arose where representatives from partner organisations were overworked, or, as in the case in some Indigenous organisations, were charged with facilitating many relationships. Increasing the representation of hard-to-reach groups within Communities for Children committees was seen as something which would help engage these groups, or at least guide the process of adopting strategies to engage them. Adding children into the consultation process was also suggested as a way to enhance participation and partnership.

Some Local Answers and Invest to Grow participants also perceived working with other services to occasionally impede engagement with hard-to-reach groups. A lack of cohesiveness and poorly developed links between services could cause some potential service users to miss out on services that could benefit them. Developing collaborative working relationships and getting people on side could be time consuming, and relationships between new services and existing providers could be fragile, especially in small communities:

‘We’ve had to be really collaborative to get people on side to start with. A lot of them in the regional services were frightened, they thought it was competitive. A lot of our work was about spending time building relationships, breaking down barriers.’
Participant 16

In another rural example, the service encountered some resistance to a healthy eating program on the basis that it may adversely affect established business factions in the small community. However, this factionalism seemed an exceptional case. In other cases, although collaboration required extra time and effort, there appeared to be a general commitment to it throughout Invest to Grow and Local Answers service networks.

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