AQR in the Social/Third Sector

Social and economic deprivation often provides an environment where wellbeing, aspirations and positive behaviour can be adversely affected. The mental toughness model provides an opportunity for charitable/social investment organisations working in these areas to understand better how their clients are responding to the environment. This also enables them to direct their interventions more appropriately and more effectively.

Specific applications include:

  • Worklessness – building aspiration and confidence where there is little tradition of any work ethic.
  • Aspiration  working with people of all ages to believe that they can achieve. This is particularly important in education where lack of aspiration can prevent individuals from going onto FE and HE.
  • Offenders & Young Offenders – The evidence shows a link with offending and mental sensitivity (the opposite of mental toughness). Applications include early intervention with young offenders through to working with prisoners prior to release to reduce the risk of re-offending.
  • Volunteering – working with volunteers to enhance their experience and offer development through self-awareness and support.
  • Employability (particularly long term unemployed and NEETS) – developing the confidence, commitment and sense of control to find a way back into the job market.
  • Restorative Practice  working with perpetrators of crime and their victims to deal with the impact of the crime and emerge stronger.

Wider social applications include:

  • Parenting skills – developing the behaviours and mind-set to understand the family and to be more effective in developing those in their care
  • Carers and volunteers – a widely under-recognised group. Carers and volunteers carry a great deal of responsibility often with little real support. Their roles are high in stressors, challenge and pressure and are often left to the task with little direction or support to develop important skills such as resilience.
  • Community Cohesion and resilience – enabling members of communities to participate more effectively in community activities and to enable building community cohesion. Include supporting individuals to become involved in representative activity in communities.
  • Social Action – developing self awareness and value which enables people to support others through their actions in the community.

MTQ48 as an integral part of understanding how to work with young people and give them the right support and a plan that’s personalised to their mental toughness level.  By incorporating MTQ48 it has also allowed us at LYR to gather intelligent data that can be used accurately to support people, while also being vital for reporting impact. Internally, the team at LYR found the process very straightforward and simple. The team, led by Ben were brilliant at coming back to us with any queries we had as we tested the process. It is now a key part of the programme and embedded into our process.

Layal Marten

Head of Development, London Youth Rowing

The Diana Award uses MTQ48 to track the impact of our 6 month Mentoring Programme. This is a programme that works with hard to reach young people in London and across the country. The programme relies heavily on the data we can collect through MTQ48 to tailor the programme for the needs of individual participants. We chose to use this measure as we believe it to be a really cost effective way of measuring the impact of our intervention in building character traits within the young people we work with, especially those who are normally facing numerous barriers. Mentors are also able to use participant reports to alter their style dependant on the needs of the individual. This means that throughout all aspects of our programme MTQ48 enables us to achieve our mission – to fully support & enable young people to reach their full potential!

Emma Scott

Mentoring and Training Manager, The Diana Award