2021-2024 Strategy Launch

Closing the Trauma Gap: Skills and Relationships built to last.

We are proud  to launch our 2021-2024 Strategy Closing the Trauma Gap: Skills and Relationships built to last which will guide our work over the next three years.

Young people sit at the centre of this strategy, from the design of our programmes, through to the strategy launch video. That is why we are delighted to have the animation voiced by a previous participant in our Face It programme, Joely. We hope you enjoy watching and that you will be inspired to share the video,  so more people will understand the importance of supporting young people at risk of exclusion, violence and trauma.

Strategic Development and Re-focus

During the last year we’ve been reviewing where we’ve come from and where we want to go and delved deeper into the root causes of the systemic issues we are trying to address. We also consulted with young people, sector peers, charities and funders on what works and what needs they had.  

Learnings from our previous strategic period included; 

  • A need for more preventative work, supporting young people before they are caught up in cycles of violence or already known to the criminal justice system.
  • Transfer of our programme online through webinars, toolkits and training delivered digitally has been successful and we continue to see demand.
  • Programmes delivered in isolation from the whole organisation (school or prison) do not achieve the best or most sustainable outcomes for our young people. 
  • Young people’s voices need to be front and centre of our work. 
  • Trauma is often found at the root of many of the behaviors we see. 

Trauma Informed Approaches

We’ve been working with young people since 2007 and we know that many we see excluded from school or in youth offending institutions have experienced emotional trauma. 

The more emotional trauma a child is exposed to, the worse their physical and mental health outcomes are likely to be. Without the right support, negative experiences can continue to severely disadvantage a young person throughout their lives, foreshadowing their potential to achieve positive life outcomes. 

We know that developing social and emotional skills for all young people is  important, but that those skills are only nurtured and developed in young people when they have trusted relationships with the adults in their lives. Just having one supportive adult-child relationship in their lives can blunt the effects of ACEs (Shonkoff et al, 2015; Forster et al 2018)

Closing the Trauma Gap: Skills and Relationships Built to Last

Khulisa will focus on ensuring young people have the three things they need to fulfil their true potential: 

  1. Improved social & emotional skills. Reaching the most at risk of exclusion and violence through an award-winning therapeutic programme and trebling our reach with a more universal offer supporting a wider range of social and emotional needs.
  2. Positive relationships with peers and trusted adults, and  We want to not only support young people directly but also build more consistent support for the professionals, peers and carers in young people’s lives. We’ll do this through a structured, accessible Trauma-informed Training for the key adults in young people’s lives, so that they are equipped with skills and understanding to best support vulnerable young people.
  3. Access to nurturing environments which prioritise their wellbeing We will also extend and deepen our relationships with the partners we work with to develop systems that are more responsive to the social and emotional needs and to create safe and nurturing environments where young people can thrive.

Our four Strategic Objectives are:

Through a new youth ambassador programme and a range of digital support programmes we will expand and deepen our existing therapeutic programmes for young people.

Through the development of our digital training, to accelerate the expansion of our trauma training for professionals and extending our support to carers and families.

Creating longer term partnerships in more defined regional hubs, we will deepen and regionalise our delivery partnerships, particularly in London, Manchester and the North-West.

With our consistent focus on Impact and Evidence, by showing the link between improved wellbeing and reduced exclusion, we will influence local practitioners and policymakers , creating awareness on the long term benefits of developing a whole school, trauma informed culture.

We would like to share a heartfelt thank you to all the peers and supporters who fed into the development of this strategy, we can not achieve our mission alone and feedback on experiences in classrooms and from policy makers and funders has been crucial.

"Khulisa's new strategy focuses on what it really means to develop and deliver sustainable interventions for young people. Sustainability is about the multi-agency relationships behind the interventions, the architecture and structure of support around the child which brings about systemic change, [...] like Khulisa we should all be thinking about how we make sure these interventions endure beyond the terms of funding agreements and beyond pilot stages." - Jessamy Gould, Director of Treebeard Trust

"[...] What is clear within this new 3-year strategy is the intention to create greater sustainability for supporting young people in school. [the strategy] creates an opportunity to really embed social emotional learning. We know that this is critical to navigating challenges in life, and especially important as a skill-set for the most vulnerable and traumatised young people in our care. We are looking forward to continuing our journey with Khulisa and being involved at supporting the delivery of this new 3 year strategy." - Barnet PRU

"Khulisa has taken a positive and refreshing approach to their new strategy, involving young people in its development [...] and professionals they work with. [...] At the SCYJ we know that there is an appetite among those working in the sector for training that helps them improve their emotional health while working in trauma-informed ways. Khulisa's strategy makes me confident that they are the right people to deliver this work." - Alliance for Youth Justice

"We have supported the brilliant team at Khulisa for 2 years and have always admired their relentless focus on creating systemic change - [...] Khulisa's new strategy goes a step further in realising their goals to create trauma-informed systems of support for all young people - we welcome their move to focus even more on positive relationships and know they will go about this work with the utmost integrity, professionalism and commitment to transforming the lives of young people who have been excluded and marginalised from society." - The Goldsmiths Company

Find out more about how Trauma Training can support you and your organisation.

If our goals resonate with you, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know your thoughts by emailing info@khulisa.co.uk 

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