Next steps: working with partners to inform our future development

Vikki Brownridge, Director of Charity Development at StepChange Debt Charity

Over the summer, we ran a three-month consultation with our partner organisations to establish how we can best work together to tackle problem debt and ensure more people get the support they need. This week, we held an event in London to share their feedback, and explore our next steps together.

As demand for debt advice increases, it’s more vital than ever before that organisations work together to support the millions of people experiencing problem debt in the UK.

On November 20, at our ‘Stepping Forward Together: Bigger, Bolder, Better’ event, we invited representatives from the organisations we work with to an event to share the feedback they gave us over the three-month consultation period, and explore how this will inform the charity’s development.

Our guest speakers

We were delighted to welcome Soulla Kyriacou of a blueprint for better business, who gave an insightful keynote speech on the importance of fairness in business and explored her organisation’s five principles of a purpose-driven business. Gareth McNab of Open Banking for Good gave an entertaining presentation on how open banking technology can be used to help people in financial difficulty. Later in the day, we also heard from Amy, a StepChange client who shared her experience of problem debt and finding a solution in a powerful and moving speech.

At the event we announced a number of developments which will be launched in Q1 2020 that have been designed to improve outcomes for clients and to make it easier for our partners to work with us to help them. These include ways to reach people earlier to prevent them from falling into problem debt, solutions to improve accessibility to our services and to deliver increased engagement, and new MI data that we will be sharing with our partners, all of which will deliver an improved client journey and better outcomes.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to all partners who provided feedback throughout the consultation either at our workshop and roundtable events, or through our online survey.

The suggestions we have received have been invaluable in informing our development, and it’s incredibly important that we continue to work with our partners in a collaborative way to tackle problem debt in the UK.

If you’d like to work with us more closely in 2020, or if you’d like to find out more about becoming one of our partners, visit our website.