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.

There's a church in the East Midlands that take all their referrals from the GP surgery, which has been quite powerful. We help them through that referral process and help those members to be able to start reaching out to their local community and providing mentoring. We're looking for churches to partner with us on this new project.

Heather: Do you have one project per city, or can it be multiple in one city with different churches?

Debra: It's better to be multiple, because we find that it's better to work with one partner church and train up 15 of their members. Or if three churches are very small and they come together and say we have five people in each congregation that want to be trained under one scheme, we can do it that way as well. From a supervisory point of view, it's better to have about 15 trained people you're working with throughout that year.

Heather: I suppose if they're mentoring people in their own community rather than crossing the other side of the city, that's much better.

Debra: Yes that's right, it's a lot better.

Heather: If someone wants to find out more how can they do that?

Debra: If they come on to our website roc.uk.com, we have a section called Projects and in there is all the information about ROC Community Mentoring in partnership with COACH. We've also developed a pack of information that we can send to anyone who might be interested to explore whether that would be a good model for them to take things forward.

Heather: And finally who's been your greatest mentor and why?

Debra: My greatest mentor would be a pastor at Altringham Baptist church called Roger Sutton. He's a wonderful pastor who always, as soon as he sees you, asks you how you are, asks about your family, and always really shows you a lot of love and care. He's somebody I worked with on Movement Day last year. He's been leading the Movement Day in the UK. He's somebody who's set a wonderful example to me through the challenges of life; somebody who really shows love and care to people.