How can we really transform systems?

Opinion Piece – Laura Millar, Fife Gingerbread Strategic Manager

Over recent weeks I have found myself talking more and more about the need to reflect on our approach to enabling families to be lifted out of poverty in a sustainable way that encourages resilience, strength and hope. I often hear terms like transformational change banded around meeting rooms, and to be honest I'm not sure any of us know what that really means or that we’re seeing a scale of change that could be categorised as transformational.

All too often we are focused on fulfilling the ‘demand’ for our services and support, and this leads to reactive rather than proactive systems.

As a result we’re stuck in a loop of firefighting. Seeing the problem, tackling the blaze and waiting for the next incident...

This loop facilitates short term solutions to poverty and trauma as we are focused on the immediate challenge or crisis, and we often lose sight of the deeper root causes.

This isn’t to suggest we shouldn’t be delivering services that address immediate needs – these are absolutely needed particularly when we consider the context of a cost of living crisis and pandemic recovery. However, in order to really change the trajectory for our children and young people growing up surviving poverty we need to tackle root causes in a much more systemic and structural way. With more ambition and greater urgency – we must be change-makers.

To become change-makers there is a key tool that we require. Time. We must carve out time away from delivering services to create the capacity to think laterally about the wider systems and challenges facing families and our own services.

In this context we could consider applying the Pareto Principle.

If we invested 20% of our time, effort and energy into systems change would this yield greater results?

This immediately creates a juxtaposition as my suggestion is that in order to solve poverty we need to consider delivering less reactive services, and use the 20% capacity created to challenge and change broken systems. The systems that were designed to support families all to often hold them stuck in place – creating never ending cycles that often become generational.

This would require some pretty radical thinking from leadership, practitioners, volunteers, families, funders, decisions makers… But, the risk is that if we don’t make a commitment of time, effort and energy to systems change then we must ask ourselves if we are complicit and part of the problem rather than the solution?

As I write this I reflect on our approach at Fife Gingerbread. I am by no means claiming to have got this difficult balance ‘right’ yet. But we will get there if we’re fearless in our approach and listening to families we support.

The fundamental principles that we will continue to apply in order to both deliver high quality services and champion for change include:

1.      We will build the capacity of families, volunteers and staff. Empowering them to challenge systems on a daily basis, and creating opportunities for them to share challenges that are systemic rather than individual.

2.      We will endeavour to create space to reflect and think about systems, and we will not assume that this mammoth task can be absorbed alongside the already demanding ‘day job’.

3.      We will collaborate. It is a privilege to connect with families in Fife and to understand the challenges affecting their lives, and with this privilege comes a responsibility to amplify their voice. We will do so by collaborating with both local and national partners to identify levers to influence systems and decision making.

4.      We will approach our work with honesty to reflect and challenge ourselves, and have the courage to have difficult conversations both internally and externally.

In order to really change the world in which we live and stop inequalities from thriving, I believe that we need to shift our approach. Even if that’s just a 20% nudge that tips the scales a little. This will move us beyond tinkering around the edges of systems, working in siloes, and protecting our own piece of the poverty jigsaw. Moving us towards making transformational change a reality.