Making a difference behind the scenes

Over the last few years, RISE has embarked on a journey to make improvements across all aspects of its work: its public presence, the experience for clients from start to finish, staff growth and development, and communication with referring agencies. One person has been instrumental to driving many of these changes in the last couple of years and he likes that he’s doing it all quietly, behind the scenes.

Aaron Agnew came to RISE in a clinical role in 2017 to work predominantly with male and youth clients. In the middle of 2022, he stopped seeing clients and switched roles within RISE. Today, he’s excited about the evolution he’s quietly helped bring about at RISE.

Time to think and imagine

The Ministry for Social Development included RISE in a national grant making programme in 2020 called Whānau Resilience. The funding paid for RISE to undertake a project to research gaps in family violence services in the top of the South, create a service to fill one of the gaps, and deliver that service over several years.

“When we received the Whānau Resilience funding, I jumped at the chance to work on the project,” Aaron says. “Little did I know how much it would change my professional trajectory! The work involved talking to everyone involved in family violence: current and former clients, agencies and other stakeholders, our staff and the staff at other agencies. I even went out to the community with a survey to get their input as well. It was complete freedom to imagine all possible ideas where RISE could do something new and innovative.”

Each idea was really important, Aaron said, and it was all achievable – depending on costs and commitment and time. Aaron said it was really exciting and it galvanised him professionally, but it was also frustrating.

“People I talked to had amazing ideas. Some were going to be much easier to pull off than others. While it was thrilling to have the space to think about all the possibilities, I knew we wouldn’t have the capacity or the money to do everything, no matter how much we wanted to. That was a bit frustrating, but we had to find the gold amongst the rocks and ultimately I think we did.”

The gold Aaron found was a programme for dads, which launched in 2021 and now runs twice each year.

Dads Programme

“I first heard from former clients who are mums. They told me there had to be a wellbeing programme of some kind for new and existing fathers. Mums had plenty of support options for themselves, but their partners were left with nothing to help them adjust to life as a dad or to get help on how to be a better parent.

“Then I heard it from local agencies too. Colleagues working in family harm would keep telling me how hard their dads found parenting. The dads had nowhere to go for help. The idea kept coming up over and over and it made perfect sense. Let’s develop something for men to learn about juggling their responsibilities to their whānau. What they learn early on as a dad could help prevent or minimise issues down the road and improve family safety.”

The Dads Programme helps dads or anyone in a father-role to be more confident and connected in their role. The course is 10 weeks long and is free for attendees, with the project still receiving funding from MSD. Participants meet other dads, exchange experiences and lessons-learned, and learn new skills and tools to increase their confidence.

After the Dads Programme launched, it was an immediate success with groups meeting regularly. Some men who finished the group wanted to meet up and check in with each other after, either in person or online. Aaron says he found this immensely rewarding.

Team development

Why stop with one success? General Manager Dee Cresswell initiated a leadership group at RISE, now named the Kaitiaki group, to look at ongoing operational improvements. Easy fixes or outside-the-box fixes – it was all welcome.

Aaron was and is part of the Kaitiaki group and, feeling professionally invigorated after the success of the Dads Programme, he took on the group’s suggestion to reach out to a sister organisation for ideas. He travelled to Palmerston North and came back with a long list of ideas. The Kaitiaki group had easy fixes, both short- and medium-term improvements, and they started discussing what to do next. Aaron was charged with implementing these.

First he took on the role of managing ongoing staff training at RISE. At least once a month the entire RISE team across all locations participates in a day-long training session that cover all aspects of the work we do.

“Staff value these days to dig into topics more deeply, understand different approaches and new research, or to hear from other professionals and experts talk about the work they are doing in this field. Dee says the team days have become more focused and meaningful since Aaron took the lead.

Aaron says, “Finding ways to help the clinicians continue their professional development was so much in keeping with what I had been doing over the last few years and I’ve really come to enjoy this particular aspect of contributing to our overall service improvement.”

Aaron kept going. He worked with all clinicians to prepare a number of resources they use for/with clients, re-designed them to unify the look and content, and printed them or made them available electronically.

“One example of this is our Time-Out handout, which pretty much every clinician uses but each of them had their own version. Now we have a RISE version and it is given to clients in a poster sized format and a wallet card so they can reference how to take time-outs in stressful situations. Clients had been asking us for this and now we have it. Everyone loves them, all of the resources have had a tremendous reception from our clients.”

In mid-2022 Aaron officially became RISE’s first Development Coordinator, a role that focuses on implementing improvements across all areas of the business that affect staff, clients, and potential clients. He is guided by the Kaitiaki group who ensures RISE’s mission, vision, values, and strategic goals are kept at the forefront. And then Aaron delivers.

“I like that the word development is in my new job title,” he says. “Finding things we can improve is totally in my wheelhouse and seeing RISE constantly improve as an organisation and as a service is incredibly fulfilling.”

Another success he’s proud of is the Kaitiaki group’s decision to raise the bar on risk management for new clients.

“One person used to conduct a quality review all new client assessments for potential risks, mental health concerns, dependency use, safety and lethality (the capacity to cause death or serious harm or damage) and such,” he says. “To lift our game and improve our standard of practice, we’re now going to have a three-person team conduct these, which will increase the potential for catching situations before they turn south. It’s a bit more work for us but we can manage it within current resources.”

The future

Over the last year Aaron has been involved with the ĀKINA Foundation around defining RISE’s impact in the community. He’s spending time working on the post-exit evaluations for clients and the follow-up efforts RISE will undertake to measure the effectiveness and impact of their programmes.

Aaron is pleased RISE has come so far in a few years and that it is moving in the right direction, even if change can be slow at times.

“We have achieved so much already and this is on top of us being a very busy team with a lot of work and pressures. Having one person focussed on this work has proven to the rest of the team that we can do it and that it should be a priority. Now everyone feels that improvement and development are woven into our everyday work, not an added extra that we might get to if we find time.”

Aaron will continue working from behind the scenes to help his colleagues and RISE clients, making positive changes for all and better outcomes for our community.