I want to tell a story about strategy, and why it makes a difference.
The story takes place in a particular meeting we had with A Way Out, a charity in the North-East which helps women involved in sex work to live healthy, safe and fulfilling lives. The charity had been delivering this service for well over a decade when we started working together, and were planning a similar outreach package for at-risk under-18s.
This isn’t all A Way Out does though. Across town in an isolated estate near the old docks they have a mentoring programme for 8 to 11 year-olds. It is a great programme, and they have some fantastic stories about the difference it has made to these kids’ lives: doing better in school, improving their home lives, engaging with their classmates. However, this wasn’t contributing to the prevention of or reduction in exploitative sex work and, in a tough financial climate, this was causing challenges.
We’d been grappling with this issue for a while, and in this meeting we were exploring how A Way Out could align the youth service, sex worker outreach and new service for at-risk under-18s. We’d played this through a number of times without quite reaching a conclusion, but this time something clicked which reinforced the need to focus their attentions.
What sharpened the focus for me was an update from the charity. Some of the women had been reporting a new area in town where on-street sex work was springing up. This had caused a fair bit of tension as it was taking business elsewhere and also undercutting price. One woman had been quite severely attacked when she refused to match the lower price.
That isn’t the worst part. The worst part for me was that some of the girls working in this new patch were exactly that: 14 year-old girls.
Up until then we’d been talking about staff development, potential income sources, sharpening their fundraising ask, measurement tools, etc. The effect of this latest news tipped the balance for me on why all of this mattered as we continued our discussions with A Way Out on the strategic options:
- Stick with the current strategy and A Way Out would lack the resource to stop these and other 14 year-olds ending up selling their bodies on the street.
Or
- Consolidate the strategy to focus on prevention, and have a chance of reaching these 14 year-olds and preventing others ending up in the same place.
And that is why strategy makes a difference.
