Photo: Maggie’s

Across Scotland, people’s health and wellbeing are shaped long before a crisis point – but too often support comes too late and too fragmented. Our Health and Social Causes strand seeks to help break cycles of disadvantage, prevent harm, and support people affected by ill health, disability or disadvantage to have more agency and control over their lives.  

Across our funded partners, we see how early help that is collaborative and person-centred, and that builds communities of support, empowers people and helps us to stay well. And the third sector, through close working with cross-sector partners, can help to demonstrate this holistic approach and shift systems to work better for people.

Why early, relational support matters  

When support comes early – before a situation becomes overwhelming – people have more space to breathe, connect and make decisions with confidence. 

We see this clearly in early years and family support. Because a baby’s earliest experiences shape the architecture of their developing brain, nurturing, emotionally attuned care can help lay the foundations for lifelong wellbeing for a child.  

Multi-Cultural Family Base (MCFB), for example, works with ethnically diverse families across Edinburgh, offering culturally responsive support from pregnancy onwards. Recognising how difficult it can be to give birth and parent without networks or in a new cultural context, their approach models curiosity, respect and cross-cultural understanding. By listening closely, tailoring support, and working in partnership with health professionals and social workers, MCFB helps families build stability, connections and confidence.   

Learn more about MCFB’s culturally responsive support for families in their spotlight story.

Later in life too, preventative, responsive support helps safeguard our wellbeing. Lorn & Oban Healthy Options support adults to stay active and connected and have deliberately evolved their approach towards flexible, long-term support.  

Recognising that short, time-limited progammes could unintentionally create a “cliff edge” of support, they reshaped their work to allow people to move flexibly between different services as needs change – creating a pathway to “catch somebody early” and sustain wellbeing over time. This flexible structure is now central to their preventative approach: spotting changes sooner and helping people stay active, connected and well over the long term. 

Across these examples, early intervention is a way of working: be present before crisis, build trust slowly, listen deeply, adapt support, and strengthen people’s own agency.  

Listen to participants share how Healthy Options is helping them stay active, connected and well in this short film by Beth Chalmers.

Knitting the social fabric that holds us  

Grantees supported through the Health and Social Causes strand are all engaged in building communities of support of one kind or another – facilitating the informal networks, peer groups and community spaces that help people stay connected, reduce loneliness and build resilience. It’s a key method of ‘doing’ prevention and empowering folk.  

Whether it’s a parent group, a community hub or a sports club – we all need opportunities to form meaningful relationships and to feel part of something.   

Peer support can be uniquely powerful: people feel understood, not judged; peers can offer deeply personal insights; and people can build confidence and find purpose through mutual support.  

For example, Men’s Sheds are peer-led spaces where men can build friendships, regain purpose and stay connected. Participants report improved wellbeing, reduced loneliness and, in some cases, life-saving support through renewed connection. And behind the scenes, the Scottish Men’s Sheds Association supports over 200 Sheds across Scotland, helping them get off ground and to run effectively.   

Local Home-Start charities work with families across Scotland from pregnancy through to school age. Although the bedrock of the Home-Start model is one-to-one support, opportunities to attend groups are almost always available too.   

At Home‑Start Glasgow South, “Warm Place” groups have become an essential source of connection and support for families. Across four weekly sessions up to 250 families each year find a safe, welcoming space to play, meet others and access practical help. This offers a cost-effective way to reach many families and provide immediate support and triage – while building peer networks that help parents stay steady through the ups and downs of family life.  

These communities matter because they strengthen the “social fabric” around us — the relationships that hold us, help us cope with change, and prevent small challenges from becoming crises. They can also show us that we have power as a collective to help ourselves and others.  

Working together builds stronger support  

The issues people face rarely fall neatly within the remit of a single service or sector. Collaborative approaches have a better chance of addressing the messy complexity of real life, bringing together the strengths of different partners, and helping us to see the whole person.  

Maggie’s centres embody this approach, offering welcoming, therapeutic and non‑clinical spaces co-located with NHS cancer services so people can access emotional and social support alongside medical treatment provided by NHS partners.   

3D Families has also invested deeply in collaborative working. Acting as a trusted local anchor within Drumchapel, they work alongside health visitors, social workers and nurseries to ensure families get the right support early. By leading the Drumchapel Children & Families Network, they bring practitioners together to learn, reflect and problem-solve — strengthening relationships and building shared approaches across the system, so that it works better for families. 

Learn more about 3D Families and their approach in this spotlight story, A part of the family.

In Edinburgh, Dean & Cauvin Young People’s Trust are also using partnership working to help change systems for the better. Working with City of Edinburgh Council, NHS Lothian and others, they are supporting young families facing challenges from pregnancy onwards.

The partnership is delivering intensive support, providing residential placements and training practitioners in infant-led tools. Together, they are developing a shared approach grounded in emotionally attuned, relationship-based care and making changes to practice that they hope will stick for the long-term.

These approaches show how collaboration – grounded in trust and relationships – can make support more joined-up, preventative and human. And when the third sector’s relational strengths are married with the statutory sector’s reach and infrastructure, the result can be a stronger, more coherent ecosystem of support.    

Empowering people and organisations  

Across all of this work, empowerment runs as a consistent thread: people feeling more confident, more connected, more understood and more able to shape their own lives. Whether through early relational support, peer networks or joined‑up approaches, the impact goes beyond service delivery to people finding their footing, their voice and their agency.   

But none of this happens without resources. The current fundraising environment is particularly challenging for charities delivering relational, community‑based and preventative support – work that is vital but often resource‑intensive and less suited to short‑term outcomes and funding.

We know that multi-year, flexible funding can help with this. It gives organisations space to be responsive, work holistically, build trusting partnerships and be part of in the complex, long-term work of improving how systems support people. 

When we invest in organisations in this way, we hope to support the relationships, stability and creativity that enables communities across Scotland to thrive.

Under our Health and Social Causes theme, one of our focus areas is support for families with children in the early years, or even during pregnancy. Here, we share the learning journey we’re on, as we consider how we can best play our role in helping babies, toddlers and their families to thrive.

More than any other time in life, our earliest experiences lay the foundations for our future wellbeing and life chances. From birth to 18 months, babies’ brains are growing at an astonishing rate of over a million new connections per second. It’s a time when a nurturing, responsive relationship with a caregiver teaches us the world is safe and that we are loved – setting the scene for all of our future relationships and learning.

It’s also a time of great change and challenge for a family. Since my daughter was born in 2021, it’s been an overwhelming experience of love, joy and learning – with lots of exhaustion and plenty of difficult times too.

In these early days – and even during pregnancy – parents and babies are very vulnerable and need support of many kinds. The challenges are greater for families facing existing disadvantages, like poverty, trauma or mental health problems.

Too often, early or preventative support isn’t available in a system where stretched resources are – understandably – diverted to those already in crisis.

(The video below, from NSPCC, explains more about how early experiences lay the foundations for babies’ brain development.)

Many tools in the box – flexible and holistic support

Initially, we looked to support specific evidence-based parenting programmes. These are valuable in that they provide a structured and proven way to develop parenting skills and connect with fellow caregivers.

But all families’ goals, strengths and needs are different – and increasingly we learned that families need tailored support, with structured parenting programmes being just one ‘tool in the box’.

We’re now largely focused on supporting organisations providing ‘holistic family support’ – support that is flexible, multi-faceted and that considers the whole family and their context. This could be, for example, providing a listening ear, giving practical help at home, advice on money and work, or opportunities for new friendships – or all these things at different times. All with the aim of enabling that family to thrive and for a child to have the best start in life.

Learning from community-based family support charities

In 2022 we co-commissioned some research with Cattanach, a specialist early years funder, to help us better understand the ‘landscape’ for community-based charities delivering holistic family support. This highlighted the strengths of this type of support, for example that it:

• Helps parents build skills and confidence through modelling
• Provides support that isn’t time limited
• Has a close and constructive relationship with statutory services
• Connects parents and families with each other, harnessing the power of shared experience

But the research also highlighted there are lots of challenges for these organisations – like rising demand, higher and more complex levels of need, a shortage of counselling and therapeutic services, as well as staff recruitment, retention and burnout.

Like in other sectors, raising funds for this work is not easy. In the research, service managers explained some of the funding challenges, including:

• reduced local authority funding
• funders of various types overlooking the value of early and holistic family support
• funding being silo-ed by age or other characteristics, or being too short term

How can we best play our role as the Foundation?

All of this leaves us asking, how we can best play our role as a modestly-sized independent funder in this space? We know long-term, unrestricted funding is key – but, especially if we want to give meaningfully-sized grants, our funding for frontline support will only go a little way.

Collaboration with other funders – including statutory funders – seems crucial to help us better understand the patchy funding system we are operating in, and to enable more coordinated efforts.  As a first step, we want to support Cattanach in continuing to facilitate a shared a forum for funders with an interest in this area, the Funders for the Early Years Group in Scotland. We have a long way to go on further funder collaboration and welcome any suggestions or ideas.

We also plan to continue to give a small proportion of our funds to support ‘behind the scenes’ work that is about networks or the early years workforce, or to work that seeks to influence wider change, so that ultimately more families can get early support that is centred on them.

Poverty – the elephant in the room?

One question that we find ourselves grappling with lately is, with almost one in four of Scotland’s children still living in poverty, is there a limit to how effective family support can be whilst a family doesn’t have enough money to meet its basic needs and to take money worries off the table?

Others in Scotland and beyond are asking this too. We were interested, for example, to learn more about the Baby’s First Years study in the USA which gives direct cash transfers to low income mothers, at a recent event hosted by Nesta and Save the Children in Glasgow. It found that after one year, infants whose mothers had received $333 dollars per month from the project, were more likely to show faster brain activity in a pattern associated with learning and development at later ages – although structural inequalities remained.

We can’t journey alone

Our learning journey is ever-continuing. Much like in family life, we know that we need to keep listening, responding and nurturing our relationships. We welcome any input to help us navigate a course that maximises our contribution to enabling babies, children and families to thrive.