Thinking outside the box to support New Scots and forge crucial relationships

"From an integration perspective, people now have a greater understanding of what it's like to be a New Scot."

Health and social care integration is crucial in ensuring individuals and communities can work together, forge strong relationships, and share decisions with one another. In line with this, Outside the Box is an exemplary third sector organisation providing developmental support to groups across Scotland who want to make a difference in their communities.

With a range of diverse projects across the country, Outside the Box put people at the centre by working in an integrated and inclusive way. By providing practical support and enabling people to learn new skills, Louise Willson, CEO, and Freya Young, Community and Communications Worker, say that the organisation is supporting people to make their communities better.

“Our mission is to support welcoming and inclusive communities, so we work in many areas with many people”, Louise says. “We work with New Scots who’ve experienced trauma and lived very complicated and difficult lives, so we do this using trauma informed peer support approaches that has community development underpinning it.”

Outside the Box receive human rights funding from the Scottish Government, which has allowed them to work with different communities to produce charters, conduct research, and provide resources to support them. This has also included working with a group of people with learning disabilities around decision-making to ensure they can learn how to make choices for themselves.

“The funding has also allowed us to provide training around human rights for people from the council, community groups and community members”, Freya adds. “It’s been used as an introduction to human rights, as well as a guide to how that can be used in funding applications, so it’s a real mix of people who come along all over Scotland.”

Outside the Box have a strong partnership with Moments of Freedom – a New Scot led group of women who use peer support to develop inclusive community connections. In line with this, Outside the Box supported the group to foster strong and authentic relationships in the community and with politicians by recommending that they regularly attend surgeries to consult with the group, ensuring their views and lived experiences are heard.

“From an integration perspective, people now have a greater understanding of what it’s like to be a New Scot”, Louise adds. “I think from the politicians point of view, they’ve now got an understanding of a particular group that would generally be considered hard to reach, so it’s added resource and infrastructure to the local community.”

However, Outside the Box has encountered challenges whilst working with multiple languages partly due to their funding for interpreters recently coming to an end. In line with this, the organisation has been innovative in ensuring that this is not a barrier to creating those crucial relationships.

“We’ve had a few projects where we haven’t had an interpreter and it’s made it harder to foster relationships”, Freya says. “But there are solutions such as translation tools on Canva or Word, and the women have told us that the Arabic translations are nearly perfect, so that’s been really good.”

Going forward, Outside the Box hopes to support Moments of Freedom in their transition to becoming an independent organisation, whilst continuing to use their trauma informed peer support approaches to support more groups of New Scots.

“There are less opportunities for women who are New Scots because they face more barriers, so we definitely see that as a gap we would like to fill, and in regards to community integration, we will be looking to create a network of peer support groups for women to share what we have learnt”, Louise says. Freya adds: “We get a lot of people reaching out to us from rural parts of Scotland and there’s more barriers for them to get the support they need, so I think an online peer support group is so needed.”

You can find out more about Outside the Box on their website: https://otbds.org