Drink and Drugs News DDN November 2019 (1) | Page 14

INTERVIEW
Change Grow
Live wants its
new strategy
to come from
staff and service
users, says
Mark Moody.
DDN reports
‘I
hate the word brand – it’s
more about personality.’
Mark Moody, chief executive
of Change Grow Live is
explaining the thought behind the
charity’s new strategy. You might
think we are notorious for being
business-like, he says, but we
haven’t been too good at telling our
story, ‘describing who we really are’.
Launching a new strategy right now
is a ‘deliberate and real’ attempt to
express the organisation’s values.
As chief executive for two and
a half years, Moody had ‘a fair idea’
about some things he wanted to
Change Grow
Live’s strategy
Doing things better…
‘Let’s do things with people,
not to them.’
Working together…
‘Our partnerships involve
everyone.’
Telling our story…
‘Everyone should know
they’ll be treated with
respect and dignity.’
14 • DRINK AND DRUGS NEWS • NOVEMBER 2019
IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU
do. But more than 20 years in the
sector, initially as a frontline worker,
taught him that any new strategy
had to come from the people who
would be affected. ‘The principle is
not to do things to people, but do
things with people,’ he says. ‘If you
don’t pay attention to what people
want, you will fail.’
With 3,500 staff and 75,000
service users, this was going to be
a major undertaking. A series of
events were attended by more than
1,000 staff and hundreds of service
users. ‘We looked at what’s good
and bad about the organisation
and the values came out of it,’
he says. His role ‘became almost
administrative’ as the strategy was
written by staff and service users
– ‘The way we came up with it is
illustrative of the way we work.’
One of the organisation’s
perceived strengths was the quality
of its staff and one of the main
dislikes was ‘bureaucracy’. Where
things like CQC should be ‘a force
for good’, the strategy meetings
highlighted a mindset of managing
risk rather than meeting need, says
Moody. The ‘well-intentioned but
flawed’ national drug treatment
monitoring system (NDTMS) was
seen as ‘a giant data set that’s
recording more stuff about a person
with a substance misuse problem
than a person with cancer’.
We need to make the whole
thing about people, not numbers,
he says. Service users wanted to be
seen ‘as a person with a problem,
rather than a problem on legs’. The
refreshed strategy and values would
involve everything and everybody
across Change Grow Live’s many
and varied projects and services,
especially service users.
‘I’m passionate about service
user involvement,’ says Moody, who
relies on feedback from an active
service user council. ‘The feelings
and needs of our service users
influence how our services are run,’
he says, while acknowledging that
service user involvement doesn’t
have ‘the teeth it needs’.
‘We’re in the middle of a public
health disaster with drug-related
deaths,’ he says. They’re called hard
to engage people, but they’re not
– it’s the services that are hard to
engage with.’ He wants to reach the
people ‘in the middle’ of their crisis
and not just those who have come
out the other side of treatment. The
new strategy will depend on strong
partnerships – internally, with
service users, and across the sector.
‘They’re called hard
to engage people,
but they’re not –
it’s the services
that are hard to
engage with’
He says that Change Grow Live’s
‘story’ must involve local authorities,
commissioners and everyone they
work with, including service-user led
organisations like Red Rose Recovery
and Build on Belief, who are a vital
part of the commissioning process –
‘otherwise we would be robbing the
community’.
Moody believes his role as chief
executive should be about creating
conditions for getting answers.
‘I joined this organisation as a
frontline worker and am no more
likely to have a good idea now than
then,’ he says. ‘Today there are
potentially thousands of workers
who have better ideas than I do – it’s
in my self-interest to listen.’ DDN
www.changegrowlive.org
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