When the Suffolk Coastal Debt Centre (SCDC) was founded in 2018, working with clients to alleviate their debt was enough to set them on the path to wellbeing. Progressively, over the last eight years, the characteristics of our service users have changed and the majority now exhibit a number of causes of poverty which compound to make helping them out of poverty a much more challenging task. We have adapted to meet this more complex environment by providing a number of other services and activities not directly related to debt.
Our revised strategy, our new name – Suffolk Coastal Poverty Action (SCPA) – and our changed organisational structure not only reflect this change but put us on a pathway to evolve into a much broader anti-poverty charity by 2030. Rather than dealing primarily with debt, a symptom of poverty, we now seek to help people overcome the compound causes of poverty as well as its effects, hopefully leading to a greater sense of wellbeing. Some of these causes are very intractable and some (not necessarily the same ones) require dedicated technical expertise that we are unlikely to be able to provide. However, by effective triage we aim to understand and support service users holistically and we are augmenting our range of support accordingly. We are also improving our ability to signpost more effectively to partner organisations which have the necessary competencies to help those in need.
For more about the changes in the experience that we have observed and our new operating model to address current needs, please watch this video.
One year into our new Strategy, we have already made major strides. We have strengthened our Debt Help function, freeing Laura to focus on Triage (and managing the team); we have launched our employment support and we have retrained many of our loyal volunteers in our new holistic anti-poverty approach. We have also started – where funding is available – to refer service users experiencing significant mental health issues for counselling with our partner team of qualified counsellors.
But there is much that needs to be done and the scale of the challenge would overwhelm us were it not for the inspiration we receive from our team, our supporters and through the life of Jesus.