Demonstrating the need for our work to funders can be exhausting. We’re down on the ground, dealing with real people, hearing real stories, and hearing time and time again that the experience people have on our courses is vastly different to anything they’ve ever experienced before in treatment. We see first-hand the impact that being given information and psychological theory has on people being able to join the dots for themselves, literally feeling the pennies dropping around the room when people develop new insight into why their lives turned out the way that they did. To us, it’s bloody obvious that our courses are needed.

We get it. A wider case needs to be made. We don't expect money just because we say our work is needed. So we quote relevant research to show that there is indeed a need for what we seek funding for. We quote government reports, stating that there is a projected budget gap of £2.4 bn in adult social care between now and next year. We quote studies illustrating that individuals with complex needs incur an average of £250,000 of service use costs, with some building up almost £1 million over the course of their lifetime. We quote the latest Public Health England figures that show that 92% of opiate users and 61% of non-opiate and alcohol users who have completed treatment relapse within six months. That’s a hell of a lot of people going back into the system and – outrageous costs aside – to each individual who feels they have been unable  to sustain their recovery, there is a personal sense of failure, shame, defectiveness and helplessness that is reinforced with each relapse.

We go on to quote our outcomes to contrast the dreary national picture we have to paint. We’ve worked with 286 people across six different courses since we launched Foundation for Change in 2014. Out of those, 198 graduated – an overall success rate of 69%. On our flagship course PfC, our success rate is 77% with our longitudinal data showing that 46% of them are now in employment.

What we do works. But quoting reports and even shouting about our great stats can somehow still feel cold and disconnected from the actual people who benefit from our work here. Yesterday, our 13^th intake of Psychology for Change finished with a 100% success rate - all 11 people who started making it through to the end. We thought we’d ask them to give you a sense of why they think the course is needed.

The photos speak for themselves.