Heather Bellamy spoke with Debra Green, the executive director of Redeeming Our Communities, about ROC Community Mentoring, the Troubled Family agenda, and the transformation that can come from being mentored for 26 weeks.

Like you've just said, there could be a number of them, but you're really going to try and help them with a maximum of about three. It's a bit unrealistic to try and sort out every single issue that's happening in that home. You pick on the three key issues and agree that together with that mum, so you're having a conversation. Over those 26 weeks, you're helping them to work on some solutions around those three things. It can be more than three, but we recommend to make an impact in three of the most significant areas of dysfunction, to make a tangible difference in that to put them back on their feet.

Heather: When you're talking about people in great need, it's not a great amount of time, 26 weeks, but do you find that people have progressed quite far and can stand without that mentor after that? Or by then have you passed them on to somebody else who's helping them?

Debra: You referred to this before, but maybe they're going to need some specialist help, so maybe one thing you'd do is refer them to specialist help in that process. The whole thing of the 26 weeks is really good because it gives an end time to the mentoring process and that is very important, because you don't want to encourage co-dependency. You want to make sure that person is genuinely being helped in such a way that they can help themselves and they're not becoming dependent on you.

We usually find that 26 weeks is about the right length of time, provided that those goals have been achieved and they're measured at the beginning and measured at the end, then you know you've got that family back on its feet, which is the whole purpose of that mentoring process.

Heather: Do you have any figures, or can you describe where the nation is at, in terms of how many families would be in need of this type of help?

Debra: The Troubled Family agenda is costing the UK about £9 billion a year. That's just the most acute families in need.

I'll give you one example: I was working on a project called Better Life Chances in one of the boroughs of Manchester, where we were looking at why families have found themselves in this particular situation. One family that we did a case study on were costing the tax payer, or the community purse, £220,000 a year. They were being dealt with by 32 different agencies. Think of things like hospitals, police being called, housing, fire service because of fires being set, drugs being taken and truanting from school. Thirty two different agencies dealing with that particular family and those agencies are not talking to each other about it, so you're getting duplication, conflicting advice and the family is literally slipping through the net at a cost of £220,000.

This way of doing it, in a collaborative way, making sure the agencies are talking together and being referred properly through the process, is a huge cost saving to the community purse, as well as helping lives get transformed and people standing back on their feet.

Heather: It's quite an extreme level of need. Have you got any stories you could share of lives changed through this mentoring programme?

Debra: Yes. There's this fantastic story of a lady in the Sussex area, which you wouldn't necessarily think of as an area where you'd get a massive number of referrals, but we do. Her life was being really challenged by the multiple things she was dealing with in the home as a single parent, and she didn't have anybody investing time in her life, but through this 26 week programme she's come through that now. Her child's started regularly attending school; she also has access to services in the community that she didn't know existed. She's also become a member of a church where she's getting support as well.

She was sharing her testimony a few weeks ago in the church, about how she felt so lonely and she was in this on her own. Now she feels she has a community to belong to. It's so powerful to see how somebody who goes in and spends a couple of hours a week, which we could all give, just to see somebody's life like that change so radically.

Heather: How many cities is this in at the minute and how many people are being mentored?

Debra: This is a brand new project for us, so we have about 20 different schemes at the moment in Plymouth, in a couple of places in Devon and Cornwall, in Sussex and in greater Manchester. We've got a couple of projects in the Midlands.

As I say, it's very big in Australia and one of the aims at the moment is to make this project available to churches so that we can partner with a local church; we can say look, we can come in and deliver this training course for you to train up to 15 of your members as a community mentor. We can start to help that church to see where their referrals are going to come from.