The Change
Foundation
Building an embedded culture of support around emotionally demanding, high-impact work.
& WELLBEING
SUPPORT
DEVELOPMENT
Foundation
The Change Foundation uses sport as a tool for social change, creating safe and healing spaces where young people can build confidence, feel supported and grow.
A values-led organisation
doing emotionally demanding work.
The Change Foundation uses sport, mentoring and personal development to support young people, with a team delivering emotionally intense, high-impact work. Many staff also bring lived experience of their own, adding depth to the work while creating particular demands around confidence, boundaries and emotional wellbeing.
As the organisation continued to grow, the question was how to support people sustainably while helping them develop as professionals and as individuals, without treating wellbeing as something separate from the culture and everyday work of the organisation.
Supporting a team doing
emotionally demanding,
high-impact work.
The challenge was to support a team carrying the emotional demands of frontline work while continuing to grow as professionals and as people. Rather than offering isolated wellbeing initiatives, The Change Foundation wanted a sustainable approach that could strengthen confidence, boundaries, connection and support across the organisation.
emotionally intense work
and healthy boundaries
and psychological safety
support across the team
An integrated approach,
embedded across the team.
We designed the programme as an interconnected model of support, bringing together individual coaching and psychotherapy, peer development, group reflection and leadership support. Each strand addressed a different part of the challenge while reinforcing the others over time.
This was not a series of one-off wellbeing initiatives.
It was an embedded ecosystem of support,
designed to strengthen both individual wellbeing and the wider
culture around it.
Support embedded
across the organisation.
Over 12 months, we worked across individual, team and leadership levels rather than relying on a single intervention. The programme combined confidential support with shared learning, peer development and leadership reflection, creating multiple routes into support across the organisation.
Peer Champion Training
Two full-team development days building confidence, connection and peer support skills
1:1 Coaching & Psychotherapy
Confidential individual support available throughout the programme
Group PsychoEducation & Reflection
Shared learning around boundaries, emotional regulation and psychologically informed practice
Leadership Strategy & Tools
Connecting staff support, team culture and organisational decision-making
Strong engagement,
practical change.
Across the first year, feedback showed strong engagement with the programme and practical benefits for staff, while shared language around stress, boundaries and support began to become part of how the team worked together.
POSITIVE SESSION FEEDBACK
Rated Strategy & Tools and Group PsychoEducation sessions fairly or very useful
PEER SUPPORT CONFIDENCE
Increase in confidence supporting colleagues following Peer Champion Training
1:1 SUPPORT
Average rating from early reflections on individual coaching and psychotherapy
LEARNING THAT STUCK
Concepts around stress, boundaries and support continued to appear across later sessions
Findings are drawn from post-session surveys and early 1:1 reflections. They provide strong directional evidence from Year 1, while reflecting modest sample sizes and self-reported feedback rather than a causal before-and-after study.
From providing support
to building capability.
Year 2 builds on the foundations established during the first year. Alongside continued individual and whole-team support, the focus is expanding towards internal capability, evaluation and longer-term organisational development, helping The Change Foundation embed psychologically informed practice more sustainably from within.
I feel more positive, organised and motivated within my work. It has also helped me maintain and build positive relationships with my colleagues.