Integrating safeguarding, coproduction and EDIB at Turn2us

It’s National Adult Safeguarding Week so we thought we’d take the opportunity share some updates and insights from our safeguarding work at Turn2us.

This year’s theme, safeguarding yourself and others, encourages conversations around organisational culture, staff wellbeing, coproduction, and creating an environment where sharing safeguarding concerns is welcomed, and people do so because they have confidence in the process that will happen next.

Protecting the safety and wellbeing of those involved in Turn2us’s work needs to be at the centre everything we do, including our staff, the people who use our services and our partners. Creating a positive safeguarding culture that promotes understanding and learning and allows for open and honest conversations about safety is vital to our success, and a key part of our new strategy. That’s why we’ve decided to bring together safeguarding, coproduction, and EDIB (equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging) under the umbrella of our new inclusion team.

Why does safeguarding now sit in our inclusion team?

We’ve done this because whilst safeguarding, coproduction, and EDIB often sit in different parts of an organisation these areas of work have a strong cross-organisational remit and share many intersecting principles. They all involve addressing imbalances of power and continually improving accountability towards people with lived experience of financial insecurity. 

Our journey to integrate them is, in part, due to our commitment to considering safety and inclusion in everything we do. We also want to work towards every individual, regardless of their background, finding respect, a voice, and a sense of safety within the organisation. Turn2us is not aware of many other organisations who have brought all these areas of work together into one team before and this blog is the first in a series we intend to write, sharing our experiences of how it works as part of our commitment to learning in the open and hopefully informing and inspiring others.

How will an integrated inclusion team better support our purpose?

Safeguarding, coproduction, and EDIB are all important to the evolution of our sector, and each can cause concerns with service users and staff if not managed effectively. Embedding them within a new team and into our programmes should enable a strong and necessary alignment between our internal and external practice. Working together should help us to consistently share learning with one another and create greater visibility across each area of work respectively.

Designing programmes that centre lived experience, safety, and diverse voices will make it easier for us to offer support to people facing financial insecurity and challenge the systems and perceptions that cause it. We hope we’re helping to blaze a trail in the sector by sharing what we learn and that others can take inspiration from our progress as they look to the future.