Do Whatever It Takes

There can be many obstacles that young people within our care are faced with. They live within a system that can be difficult to navigate with lots of processes, meetings, reports and red tape. They have had multiple adverse experiences before they come to live in our homes, which manifest in different ways for everyone. For this reason, our second value is “Do Whatever It Takes” to motivate our staff to achieve the best outcome for our young people, even where it is very difficult.

Our aim is to make our young people feel valued and have a sense of belonging. A typical parent would do whatever it takes to ensure their child has the best possible opportunities and outcomes in their lives. Inspire Scotland takes on its corporate parental role in the same vein. It strives to ensure that every young person receive not only the everyday necessities, but additional support to enable the young person to process and deal with the adverse and traumatic experiences they have had. This might include referrals and support to attend specialists for mental health, physical health, specific educational needs, amongst others.

We want to inspire a high level of commitment and dedication among our staff. We want them to go above and beyond to fight the system to achieve positive outcomes of the young people in our care. We want our staff to use their creativity and resourcefulness in problem solving to address challenges but also to ensure love, silliness and fun is present for our young people. This could be overcoming a young person’s resistance to forming trusting relationships or feeling ‘too cool’ for being silly. We want to be resourceful and flexible, finding creative ways to care for our young people; adapting to unique situations and tailor their approach to meet the specific needs of everyone in their care. This is very important, as each young person’s experiences are different and often traditional ways of parenting or interacting are ineffective in engaging them in a meaningful way.

Inspire Scotland wants to empower our staff to take ownership of their responsibilities and where a young person wants to do something specific, like cook a dish that reminds them of home or do a specific activity that may be difficult to achieve, find creative ways to meet their needs. Where there are budget restrictions, managers and directors are expected to do whatever it takes for the young people to have the best experiences possible whilst in our care and to find ways to make opportunities possible.

Ultimately if everyone within Inspire Scotland does whatever it takes for our young people, it will develop a sense of belonging for them within their home and with the people who care for them. This is a basic need of every person and it can be hard to achieve for some of our young people. When a young person experiences their staff doing everything they can for them, finding ways around the barriers to enable them to do or achieve something they previously thought was impossible, it creates a sense of belonging, love and nurture.

While it is important that the value “do whatever it takes” is embodied by Inspire Scotland, it is also important that individual staff members do not try and do “whatever it takes” on their own, above and beyond their role specification. We do not want the individual worker to risk burnout, trying to do too much that is unsustainable. It is important not to blur the boundaries that staff are required to work within to ensure the safety of the young people. If one person does go beyond their remit, it may seem other workers do not have the same level of commitment and could instigate inconsistent standards. When applying this value appropriately, it can achieve wonders for our young people.