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Engaging hard-to-reach families and children

7. What additional supports are needed?

7.1 Effectiveness of the models
7.2 Universal and targeted approaches
7.3 Summary

In terms of additional supports, participants indicated longer-term, more secure and more generous funding arrangements—including for extra staff—and adapted timelines to allow for relationship building processes would be beneficial. Research and information were also identified as factors that would help services better engage hard-to-reach groups.

Funding

To improve both reach and engagement of hard-to-reach groups, some participants called for more resources to expand and extend their reach, or to allow them to provide specific activities—like day trips—that could facilitate bonding between clients and staff and overall service engagement. Overwhelmingly, participants agreed that longer-term funding was necessary to properly serve vulnerable populations. Short-term funding translated to short-term relationships. These were not only considered ineffective, but also unethical if they raised the expectations of, and then abandoned, vulnerable service users:

‘This funding is three years, which is quite a long time. But it’s a slow process to engage hard-to-reach groups. It requires building trust and working slowly at the pace of the person you’re working with. It takes time. Constraints like the funding running out can be frustrating. You see yourself building trust in relationships but you see a point where you can’t be involved. You feel frustrated you can’t make a commitment to the relationship.’
Participant 10

‘The short-term nature of funding is infuriating. The climate is so hard, with having to apply for funding all the time. After 18 months we’ve had great success in terms of young people wanting it, self-referrals and referrals from other agencies. After 18 months you can just start to see the results.’
Participant 3

Longer-term funding support from various sources would allow services to maintain their profile in the community, build trust and develop relationships with clients and other services, all of which are necessary to affect change.

Staffing

While a few participants felt staffing resources were adequate, several mentioned requiring extra workers, specialist staff, better pay (to help with recruitment and retention), and more continuity for staff (to minimise disruptions to clients) if they were to better engage hard-to-reach groups. As one participant explained:

‘Being able to be an attractive employer is important. The better employees we have the better work we can do.’
Participant 19

Indeed, short-term funding resulted in short-term staffing, which could impede relationships with young people:

‘When young people know it’s a consistent, steady service, that it’s not judgmental, that we’re working with them to get the things they want, when you spend time building relations, over time you get to link in.’
Participant 3

Bilingual workers and Indigenous workers were in particular demand, along with outreach workers generally and cultural diversity training for all staff:

‘As part of our funding I’d like to see an Aboriginal liaison officer, or have our staff trained in cultural diversity. So the government tells NGOs what to do but NGOs are struggling to know how to do that appropriately.’
Participant 16

Indeed, stability in staffing of outreach work was important, offering a sense of continuity to hard-to-reach communities.

Time

Several participants also pointed to the need for more time, and funding that recognised the length of time necessary to address complex community needs:

‘We thought it would be up and running quickly. But it takes time to build trust and relationships, to understand the community ... if you want a sustainable outcome, that front end work takes time.’
Participant 7

‘Change happens in relationship context. It requires long-term commitment to youth in the program. You need to keep them connected even through difficult periods in their life. Long-term commitment is expensive.’
Participant 11

Ensuring that workers could network during their paid hours was also seen as essential, as coordinating services and developing effective engagement strategies required professional networking. For a course delivering professional training, extra time was seen as necessary given that training needed to be repeated for new staff because of high staff turnover rates across the sector.

Overall then, participants raised the need for funding arrangements to better recognise the time required to address complex community needs. More time was perceived as necessary for service providers to build trust, relationships and strengthen their understandings of communities, and for professionals to network and to train, and to fill positions where staff turnover was high.

Research and information

Research and information sharing were identified as further supports required, especially among interviewees involved with Local Answers projects. One interviewee called for better access to administrative data from partner institutions, such as schools, to enable better targeting:

‘If details of students that have disengaged from education, if that were kept in one record so that organisations like ours could find them easier. So information sharing.’
Participant 2

As well as administrative data, research data was seen as something that would benefit projects in terms of planning, targeting and reach, as well as promoting better understandings of various subgroups, improving program promotion strategies and informing the development of appropriate programs:

‘We’re constantly told by government departments you need to work with more Indigenous, more people from CALD communities, more with fathers. But nobody’s telling me how to do it. I want them to come and tell me about a great strategy that’s been researched.’
Participant 16

Others felt research and evaluation resources would help demonstrate effectiveness, and promote the legitimacy of their approach, which would improve relationships with, and referrals from, professional groups:

‘We encounter professional snobbery because we’re community-based and working with a peer facilitation model … It would be really useful to have research about effectiveness looking at support groups, self help groups. The research in Australia is pretty thin on the ground, and not focused on men’s groups ... We know these programs work. We need to quantify it and give services like ours professional credibility, and government and academic approval.’
Participant 5

Indeed, better research evidence about best practice in engaging hard-to-reach groups would inform program design and practice strategies. This lack of evidence emerged as a stronger theme among Local Answers participants, possibly because resources for local evaluation formed part of the Invest to Grow and Communities for Children models.

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7.1 Effectiveness of the models

In terms of engagement strategies, Communities for Children participants pointed out how the inclusionary ethos of Communities for Children facilitated activities that were adapted to meet community needs. Generally, strategies to engage hard-to-reach groups were perceived as successful, although several challenges of reach and engagement remained unresolved by the model. However, workers did perceive the mainstream, universal activities of Communities for Children to be inclusive and to engage both a broad range of clients and specific target groups.

Soft entry points were credited with reaching parents who had not previously accessed community services, and with putting people in contact with services they would not have used before. Of course, assessing the effectiveness of Communities for Children’s engagement with hard-to-reach groups is difficult. Particular groups were not necessarily identified at intake, especially where activities were based in parks or shopping centres, or involved information provision rather than a more therapeutic activity. Further, collecting personal data was not necessarily a priority. As one participant described:

‘The model doesn’t lend itself to easily identifying some of those characteristics ... we don’t want to scare people off with check lists of: Are you this background? Are you that background? What are your circumstances?’
Site 4

Notwithstanding this difficulty, participants were particularly positive about the Communities for Children model. The Facilitating Partner model was perceived to work well for engaging hard-to-reach groups, as it required community consultation and involvement, which was perceived to open up opportunities to address specific needs.

Park-based play activities were seen as particularly effective for engaging hard-to-reach groups. One participant, for example, noted that the parks had been reclaimed and families were using them increasingly, even when the Communities for Children activities were not operating. Park-based activities and supported playgroups were perceived to have high uptake by CALD populations, and to have improved the access of these families to community resources and services.

The provision of both mixed and ethno-specific playgroups was seen as successful, although a specifically Indigenous playgroup had been unsuccessful in one site, with families perceived to prefer to attend a mixed group. Indeed, in another area, participants commented that engagement strategies seemed more effective for hard-to-reach culturally and linguistically diverse groups (including new African, Afghan and Iraqi refugee families) than for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. One participant suggested it was difficult to engage Indigenous families and sometimes to identify them as ‘Aboriginal’. People using mainstream services would not necessarily self-identify as Indigenous. As well as unmet needs among Indigenous families, participants also identified a need to extend fathers’ groups to include playgroups for men, and to provide playgroups for grandparents.

In terms of unsuccessful strategies for engaging hard-to-reach families, there was one area where participants described poor targeting. In this site, funding for mothers’ groups had been withdrawn, as the Facilitating Partner felt participants were not the low socioeconomic background families who should be targeted, although they were supporting each other through other (non-class based) traumas such as diagnoses of child disability or miscarriages. As the Facilitating Partner described:

‘Two of our projects, according to local evaluation, were not assisting our client group. One had 50 families coming but only three of them lived in the Communities for Children area and most of them are well-educated, well-heeled and well-incomed. It tells us that some of our programs ... are not engaging the families that we are trying to engage. Some of our programs because of their content have a more middle-class appeal and attract parents who already have the confidence to start singing or dancing with their kids, or interacting with them, in this way, in front of others.’
Site 8

In summary, the Communities for Children model was perceived to be successful by most participants in facilitating the engagement of hard-to-reach groups, especially because it involves an inclusive approach and networking is intrinsic to the model. While Local Answers and Invest to Grow also used networks, these were not intrinsic to their model and they therefore had to rely on existing external networks.

However, there is little evidence from the qualitative component of the study to suggest the place-based, collaborative model of Communities for Children in and of itself is more effective than other programs for reaching or engaging hard-to-reach groups. This is because most of the problems of reach and engagement such as lack of transport, staffing issues and short funding cycles are intrinsic to the child and family sector generally. Because of this, the projects and activities funded by Communities for Children had to use a range of strategies to engage hard-to-reach communities; networking on its own was not a successful strategy.

It is not possible from the data collected for this project to assess the Local Answers and Invest to Grow programs as a whole in terms of their ability to engage hard-to-reach communities. The projects selected for this study were not representative of those programs and it is therefore not possible to make generalisations about Invest to Grow and Local Answers programs overall. Some of these projects were specifically chosen for this research because they were known to have attempted to engage hard-to-reach communities. However, this was not a funding requirement for either Invest to Grow or Local Answers. More importantly, as mentioned previously, Local Answers and Invest to Grow do not represent ‘models’ in the same way as Communities for Children. Further, each project acts more or less on its own, rather than delivering a model of intervention as was the case for Communities for Children.

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7.2 Universal and targeted approaches

The interviews with Communities for Children stakeholders in particular highlighted the importance of both universal and targeted approaches. Although these are posed as opposite ends of a continuum, there is quite a lot of ambiguity for both terms. Universal can refer to genuinely universal (or near universal) services or activities, such as leaflets that are given to every household in a locality, vaccination and schooling. However, in most cases for Communities for Children, the term universal was really synonymous with open access and referred to services or activities that did not have a restriction or requirement for access (other than that the family had a child under 5 years) or that operated on a drop in basis. These initiatives ranged from fun activities in parks, through to playgroups and even included counselling and other more intensive services.

On the other hand, targeted usually refers to services that are designed specifically for one group of families, such as Indigenous and CALD groups, or to specific client groups such as parents of children with disabilities, teenage parents or fathers. But targeted can also be a synonym for specialist and refer to more intensive services which require referrals from universal services.

In the context of Communities for Children, all these types of services were used. Universal services show the community that Communities for Children is not exclusively for families with identified problems or parents from particular groups. In this way, they lower the stigma associated with accessing services and encourage engagement by families who would normally avoid service provision. However, simply being universal does not guarantee that all eligible families will access those services. Services can become colonised by particular groups or cliques within the community, and can deter some hard-to-reach families from accessing those services. In most cases some sort of effort will have to be made to ensure that the most vulnerable groups of clients feel comfortable with the services. In some cases, even universal services will require active outreach measures such as home visits, out of hours provision, reminder telephone calls, special transport and translation services. Of course, not every service or initiative can provide for every possible hard-to-reach group. In each case, a judgement needs to be made about which groups the services would like to engage, and what techniques would be most appropriate.

On the other hand, targeted services focus on the particular needs of the hard-to-reach families or on their specific ethnic or social group. They send the message that the initiative cares about them and is willing to provide services tailored to meet their needs. However, targeted services can be seen as stigmatising and can also be hard to access, sometimes requiring complex assessment or referral processes. In addition, many clients are members of several targeted categories, for example, Indigenous young parents with substance abuse issues and a child with a disability. It is not generally feasible to set up a service for such specific groups, yet it is often not easy to allocate multi-problem families to any of the specific targeted groups. Thus, targeting in and of itself is no guarantee that all the clients’ needs will be met. A judicious combination of universal and targeted services is required to reach out to some of the more vulnerable groups in the community.

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7.3 Summary

The qualitative component of the study showed that participants involved in all three strands of the SFCS 2004–2009 used fluid, contextual definitions of hard-to-reach. While participants used hard-to-reach to refer to underrepresented, overlooked and service-resistant populations as outlined by Doherty, Hall and Kinder (2003), these interview participants’ accounts highlight the fact that who is hard-to-reach depends largely on service context. Indeed, community context, service resources, targeting strategies and approaches to engagement shaped participants’ experiences of reach and engagement, and which clients services find most difficult to reach.

Some identified underrepresented groups as hard-to-reach, pointing to social characteristics and circumstances such as cultural background or socioeconomic status, with Indigenous families seen as the most difficult group to engage. Other participants highlighted the importance of community and service context in defining who is hard-to-reach, with those outside service networks among the most likely to be invisible. Hard-to-reach groups could also be defined with reference to parent characteristics and behaviours. Some were also reluctant to label any groups as hard-to-reach, feeling the label detracts from notions that client engagement is a responsibility of service providers, not individual clients.

Participants identified several strategies through which they sought to engage hard-to-reach groups, relating primarily to networks, partnerships and staffing. In the first category, participants identified that intervention design and practice:

Networks and partnerships were also important for identifying needs, for finding and reaching clients (especially Indigenous families), and for building capacity and ensuring service continuity.

Staffing strategies were crucial for engaging the trust of hard-to-reach families. These included:

Participants identified a number of challenges in engaging hard-to-reach families, including:

Additional supports required to sustain engagement with hard-to-reach clients include outreach workers, improvements to staff recruitment and retention, longer-term interventions, and higher levels of funding that includes additional time and resources for relationship building.

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