Since our inception in 2014 we have:

• provided long-term therapeutic interventions to over 700 children and their families

• delivered preventative mental health projects at schools in Cambridgeshire reaching over 1,500 children and young people

• developed three community wellbeing hubs for parents and families in Huntingdon, East Cambs and Cambridgeshire to support children and families to get quick access to therapeutic services and support families to have safe homes.

We know that there is a continued and growing need for services such as ours. Learn more about the work we do below. Following the needs of our community, we work at street-level to build resilience and ensure quick access to in-person strengths-based services enabling families to get help on their own terms, in the right way.

Understanding Inequality

Our work is about breaking the cycle of trauma and poverty, tackling inequality stemming from adverse childhood experiences and promoting emotional recovery. We work at the intersection of poverty and childhood trauma, a link well documented in research (Nurius et al., 2016). Our approach strives to create conditions of freedom, safety, opportunity and equality. We believe in building the right kind of relationships that are non-judgemental and that promote freedom and choice.

Cambridge Acorn Project adopts an academic model of Justice as Action, which unites our thinking and doing. As well as our core front line services, we develop research and deliver new ideas and project that tackle the effects of trauma and inequality in our communities. Our projects are based on our community’s voice, and our community knowledge is generated through our front-line work, community consultations, researching alongside children to amplify their voices, and also by ensuring community representation within our organisation through our peer-support volunteer programme.

We have adopted a flexible-funding model, underpinned by a social justice approach to ensure we can respond to individual needs. This approach is important because the effects of trauma and abuse are non-linear and differ from child to child. This new flexible-funding approach allows us to support people through bespoke therapeutic packages made up of our own services and the services of our partners to ensure we use the right tools at the right time. We believe that this holistic method can help tackle inequality and provide better services to children, young people and families. At Cambridge Acorn Project we maintain that a multi-agency approach is needed to address inequality. Therefore, we continually strive to build networks across our communities and work with the community and other agencies to meet children and families’ needs.

Panoramic work

As we continue to learn more about how to best support children and families who have experienced trauma and abuse, we also learn more about how best to explain the work we do.

We refer to our work as ‘panoramic’ because at Cambridge Acorn Project we look at the whole context surrounding a child and family in order to put the most appropriate support in place. The work that we do is tailored to each child and their family in a holistic way and therefore, we speak about “panoramic assessments” and “bespoke panoramic packages of therapeutic support”.

The aspects we are currently working within to provide support include long term therapy, enrichment opportunities, safe homes, work in the community, school and education and help with life-admin, as well as research projects and advocacy. The following diagram shows what our panoramic model encompasses and you can read more about the impact of using this way of working to support families here.