Small Supports

Small Supports – Better Lives

Developing new small support organisations providing person-centred support; without compromise.

"Where, after all, do human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Partnership

The Small Supports Partnership is an NDTi led consortium of established small supports leaders and organisations (Beyond Limits, C-Change, Positive Support for You) with the Local Government Association (LGA).

Human rights are our foundation

Sam Smith from C-Change explains how human rights explain 'what good looks like' and how we have to set these rights at the heart of everything we do.

'An uncompromising and relentless focus on the person'

Dave Barras, Associate, Positive Support for You

Small support organisations are centred on the person and their loved ones, their story, their people, their likes, dreams, and dislikes...

'We never walk away'

Doreen Kelly, Beyond Limits

Small Support organisations stick with the person through good times and difficult times; they build trusting, respectful and reliable relationships with the person they support and with each other.

This programme is about developing new, bespoke support organisations

Centred on human rights, being person-centred and building long-term support for a person. This programme came about due to the lack of evident improvement in support developed by both the Transforming Care and Building the Right Support programmes.

Find out more

Here is a recording of an hour-long information session with Dave Barras and Nic Crosby explaining more about Small Support organisations and the programme of work. Download the slides that accompanied the event here.

Get in touch

If you have any questions, would like to find out more …if you are from an interested area or organisation, are a family member or are simply interested in finding out more about what it takes to set up a small support organisation, then email Nic Crosby, programme Lead

The Small Supports Library
- Cost & Benefits of Small Supports Organisations in England
- Building the Right Small Supports, Evaluation Report 2021
- Small Supports in Time of Crisis: This podcast series explore how individually designed and led, community-based support worked to protect both people's health and human rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- A Paper to Challenge and Inform Transforming Care Partnerships: This paper thinks about people with learning disabilities and/or autism who are living in secure settings (hospitals or Assessment and Treatment Units).
- Risky Business: the Cost of Human Life: In this blog, Sam Smith from C-Change writes about how the pandemic exposed the hidden cost of a system that has failed to take account of human worth.
- After the Storm: Hope in Adversity: A blog by Sam Smith about how COVID-19 shone a spotlight on issues that were known to exist but were not given prominent national focus.
- Bending the Arc: A blog by Sam Smith to suggest possible ways to navigate through the complexity of the challenges faced by social care.
- Introduction to the Small Supports programme June 2023

What are Small Supports?
Small supports organisations have a lot in common; here are nine key characteristics they share.
1. From the first steps the person (and their chosen family and friends) has as much control as possible and there is a commitment to this control growing.
2. The starting point to developing great support is the person’s aspirations about where they want to live and the life they want to have; conversation about support then follows from this. Compromising on control and aspirations is when things start to go wrong.
3. Supporters (staff) are recruited by and around the individual. They don’t work across services. Staff are not a substitute for friends, community peers, co-workers and neighbours.
4. People choose where they live and who, if anyone, they live with. People are the tenant or owner of their own home or perhaps live with family. There is a clear separation of housing and support.
5. Funding is sustainable and is designed and used around the individual.
6. Small supports organisations stay with people. Change and challenges are expected so they don’t withdraw support or ‘sell’ services on.
7. In their work, leadership, recruitment and actions, small supports organisations are rooted in their local community.
8. The organisations stay relatively small. Knowing each person well means not growing by more than three to five people a year and finding a natural size where people are known and valued, and the organisation is financially sustainable.
9. Small supports organisations are developed around these practices. Taking some of these practices and making them aspirations within large, segregated services will not deliver the desired outcomes.

“A Hole in My Bucket?” – how spending decisions impact wealth and wellbeing of our communities

Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar on 19 October 2023. “A Hole in My Bucket?” – how spending decisions impact wealth and wellbeing of our communities Slides can be found here and downloaded from...