Graham Pringle On Providing Trauma Focused Adventure Therapy Services For Young People
Graham Pringle is the Training Director for Youth Flourish Outdoors Ltd, a youth mental health charity, which is changing the mental health ecology for young people and their families.
YFO delivers interventions using adventure therapy. Graham is finishing doctoral research about the practice of adventure therapy for young people and has trained almost 1000 professionals so far. There is no entry level pathway in adventure therapy nor are there cross-training opportunities for existing professionals to become adventure and therapeutically skilled. Graham aims to solve this problem by creating courses offered through a registered training organisation.
GRAHAM discussES HIS EXPERIENCE WORKING IN YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH SPACE AND SHARES HIS KEY LEARNINGS AFTER RECENTLY PARTICIPATING IN THE ELEVATE+ ACCELERATOR PROGRAM.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Eliana Cruz] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in adolescent mental health?
[Graham Pringle] - My original plan when I left school was to go into teaching, but I didn't like being inside. Then, I spent 10 years in the army where I was outside a lot, but it wasn't the most fulfilling role at that time. When I left, I retrained in outdoor education, which I thought would allow me to be outdoors with young people again, which was good. Then, my wife suggested we become foster cares, which we did. We did about 12 years of foster caring. When I was doing that, the foster care agency would (of course) ask me to run camps for them, because I'm working out their education. Bit by bit, the two things came together. Some milestones for me were in 2002 I was working on my own little business with young people in residential care, doing all this adventure work. That was working really well, but I was making a bunch of mistakes and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. In 2015, we started Youth Flourish Outdoors, and I wrote a book about the work we are doing. I am still trying to understand what makes adventure therapy work and why it sometimes does not go so well. The next milestone will be when I submit my thesis for my PhD in February of next year. I hope to explain answers to some of those questions I've had for the last 20 years.
As the board member of Youth Flourish Outdoors, can you please share more about this organisation, how it works, and the impact it intends to create?
YFO has been going since 2015. It's a charity, which might make some of your listeners wonder, because this podcast is about social enterprise. But, we're not a funded charity, everything we do is fee for service. Like all social enterprises, we live and die by doing a good job, and we don't get paid if people don't turn up. Although we're a charity, we don't actually receive charitable funding. YFO works with young people between the ages of 7 to 27. All of the young people we work with have a history of adversity in childhood, meaning they have a level of distress attached to those adverse experiences encountered early on. There are a whole range of different mental health impacts and also some physical health impacts in our young people as well. What we try to do is effectively provide the opposite of the experiences harming them when they were young. A lot of our work is one-to-one; we do groups and we run camps and things, but a lot of the work is one-to-one. Young people generally are not very confident with their fears. So, when our guys go out to work with young people and take them on a little adventure for half a day, the main things they're trying to do is trying to get the young person engaged in something healthy. They're trying to give the young person choices so they can decide for themselves. No one ever asks a young person if they want to get hurt, which is what happened in the past. By simply asking, we're providing a different experience.
We give them lots of power in the program as well. Ordinarily, you think the adults are going to be the experts and they're going to be the ones that decide what happens next. That's not the way we do it. We would turn up with a menu of things that people might like to do, and then the young person chooses and we follow their lead from there.
We're trying to disempower ourselves as adults and show young people they can be in charge, they can be safe and make choices.
The adventure activities we do range from abseiling to bush walking and canoeing. A lot of the time, we just go geocaching in the local neighborhood. Anything that gets young people outdoors, doing something active, where they're feeling enjoyment from the activity and they're able to regulate their body so they're not feeling the stress they normally have. Any of those activities help them to do that. We have a wide range of things for young people. We've got young people with asperges and things like that. We have some people who are hallucinating and hearing voices, because their mind's been harmed by things earlier on. It's quite a spectrum of things we deal with, but it all goes back to that; the root cause was adversity in childhood that meant they didn't develop the way that they should have, and we try to fix that.
What are some of the key challenges you have experienced in creating early intervention programs to engage disadvantaged young people?
Apart from making an income out of it and trying to keep the business afloat, anybody who's running a small business knows that the first few years can be really testing. We've gone through all of that. The other challenges were that the system of mental health we've got in Australia doesn't work. It's difficult to have people thinking about things differently. A lot of people in mental health are paid to work in that job, regardless of the benefits to the people they're working with. We're different in that case, because we only get paid if people continue to come to us, to buy our services. We're not like a government agency where you're going to get paid regardless of how many people you see. I am not saying they don't work hard, they do. But what they're offering generally is a torque therapy approach. Often, it's cognitive behavioral therapy or one of the derivations of that. Those are not designed for young people. Young people are not just little adults, they operate differently. Their minds work differently, the way they connect in the world is different. The key challenge for us has been trying to figure out how to work with young people and not just think of them as younger adults. What are the things that work for them when talking doesn't work, which it often doesn't.
providing them with activities that are meaningful to them and trying to not buy into the standard things that people think are helpful has proven beneficial. yoga, mindfulness or various other things are helpful, but are they actually the best thing for our young people to do?
It's been interesting over the last few years testing different things with our staff to see what works. It comes down to the simple things; that is be connected with the young person and have them experience an adult who is safe, whereas in the past, the adults may not have been safe. Those are the challenges. I am trying to figure out how to do something that works for young people but is not necessarily just the same thing that's been repeated over and over and over in the system. A lot of young people start therapy and drop out really quickly. Recent statistics from our leading youth mental health services tell us that 36% of young people that come in don't show up again after their first session. With us, we've got the engagement piece worked out. We've had, I think three people over the last several years and over 10,000 sessions that we've run. Only three people amongst all of that have stopped their course of sessions early. We're getting some wins, but it is also frustrating that the system doesn't want to change despite us showing how it can.
Where do you believe social enterprise and non-for-profit organisations fit into the mental health recovery process, and what opportunities have you identified for entrepreneurs?
I see social enterprise, in particular, as being really innovative. Not many social enterprises start with big cash flow from what I can see. We're also trying to change the world and address those SDGs. We started out with not a lot of money, but lots of enthusiasm and a really strong sense of mission. That means that we do things differently, because we have to and because the system is so clunky that it doesn't like to do things differently.
We've got the opportunity as social enterprises to do something different. Government is not good at doing it, and that puts us in a position of being change makers, providing data, measurements and the right processes.
We measure and then articulate how we can help more people and other organisations help more people. That's where social enterprise comes into the mix. What can we do? Well again, government, which is where the bulk of mental health services come from, are generally brick and mortar establishments. There's a place where you go to get therapy.
What we've found is we were being asked, “can we go to the client?” We started doing that, and now we've realised that it actually works better than trying to get them to come to us. We are out there in community doing outreach because we can, and because we're small, we do what we want to do. Whereas in government, it's large and everything is pre-funded. Government is well funded and well planned into the future, but that means they're not able to respond quickly when things happen, when there are opportunities, or when a good idea floats pass. They're not able to do anything with that idea. It's up to organisations like ours that go, “oh, this is a good idea, let's just give it a shot, we can do that tomorrow!” We don't have to put six months of planning into the idea, then a year of waiting until it comes to budget and then train a workforce. We can do this in the space of days and move really quickly.
One of the benefits is when COVID-19 came along for our organisation, we were able to adapt really quickly, because everybody had to and a lot of the work we were doing was already pretty good. I think organisation and structure are what the social enterprise sector can do in the mental health space. We can be innovative and try new things. We are also able to tailor to individual circumstances much better than large organisations do.
Each individual in our organisation works very closely with the young person they're allocated. Every intervention they do is different to the ones they've done before. They're constantly creating new ideas, processes and social enterprise is good at doing that.
My experience of the mental health sector is that the model of, “six sessions of this, one session of that, you cover this topic in session three, you cover that,” are not individualised. They don't work very well. They're sometimes not much fun to do. Social enterprise can be innovative, not just systemically but with our individual services.
Impact Boom is proud to have worked with you on our Elevate+ Accelerator. What were some of the key lessons from the program that would be valuable for other purpose-led entrepreneurs seeking to create impact?
We came into this process differently to many of the other social enterprises who were in the room, who are all startups. Our organisation had been going for a few years, but we definitely needed some help. We also had this idea of expanding and beginning to train professionals and not just doing the work but training other people to do the work. The component of our enterprise we were focusing on was starting a new section of the business, this registered training organisation. The workshops were really good for us, as an established organisation, to get some pieces right that we hadn't in the past. It was also really helpful for us to explore a new direction in the business.
Things We got directly was our marketing has improved, we've learned a lot in that space, our business logic is a lot tidier than what it was, and we understand investment types plus strategies to obtain them.
We know a lot more about the SDGs, the sustainable development goals and human rights, that's really important in our work. The most uncomfortable thing for us was pitching at the end of the three months of workshops. Pitching in a very prepared way too, which will be really useful because we're going to convert that into a general elevator pitch for use elsewhere.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which are creating positive social change?
There were a few people in the Accelerate+ program who I thought have fantastic social enterprises. I particularly like Cameron Tolmie in his Bushcare Solutions business, because it has relevance to our work, and it helps people to engage with restoration of natural environments in their local area, record what they're doing and track the progress over time.
That aggregates so that the program will be able to show the total benefit of a business that might have their staff involved in this or over a geographic area and show the benefit of unplanned, spontaneous, unorganised bush care. It's a fantastic idea.
I also like David Johnston's Hassle Free Hampers; they are going out to elderly people and veterans.
What I really liked about that was it's not just the hampers of food and the things they need to get through the week in terms of cleaning products and stuff (which is the practical stuff, I really like that). But, if it was a veteran that was receiving these things, it would be a veteran that takes the hamper. If it was an elderly person getting it, it would be an older person who delivers the hamper. It's not just a way of providing the essentials, but providing a relationship that goes with it. I thought that was really clever layered way of running that. There were heaps of others. Just to name one more, Renee Shay has a business where she's going to be empowering women as changemakers in their own life.
This is in developing their careers by being on this social media website she's putting together, where they can get access to coaching, resources, and community. This is for women who are hampered by this glass ceiling, so they might be able to help each other and get some help from Renee to get through that. We can see more powerful women in positions of leadership, which I think is a wonderful idea. The thing I really thought was clever was that for every person who buys a membership in this organisation, she was also gifting one membership to a young woman from a refugee background. Everybody who's paying to be part of her social enterprise and to develop their own career are also helping develop the career of a young woman who needs extra help. I thought all three of those projects have really clever add-ons, which I think social enterprises are well known for.
To finish off, what books would you recommend to our listeners?
I would expect often the books people you are interviewing for this podcast would recommend are business or leadership related. I'll offer two different ones that are not in that vein, but are more in the work that we're doing and useful because mental health is everybody's business, no one is untouched by this. These may not be books that will help people develop their social enterprise in pragmatic terms, but it might help them develop social enterprises in terms of human connection. The first is (it was a difficult read to be honest) If Tears Were Prayers by Emma Sunshaw. This is a book about a woman with dissociative identity disorder, which is really the worst case of childhood adversity. It's a challenging read, but what it was good and shows what it was like to be inside her mind and to deal with all those things. There are some sad bits in it because of the history of what caused the problem, but reading that lived experience as a person and dealing with a mind that's been radically impacted by the experiences of childhood was fascinating.
The second book is a lot easier to read. In some ways it's not as personal; it’s The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Mate. Mate is a doctor, and he is also looking at the mental health aspects of medicine and people being physically ill or injured. He is studying how that relates to their psychology and what happened to them early in their childhood. The Myth of Normal gives us a bit of a roadmap of how we can make the world a better place from where it is now. That very much ties in with the Sustainable Development Goal; he's talking about reorienting our entire society away from the things we think are normal now but aren't. These include the facts people live to make money and that some people deserve more success than others. He really shows how we can move away from the perils of liberalism and the patriarchy.
