Speaker 1 (00:00.3)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Abbie Trussler, Communications Officer at Number 5 Young People. Abbie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. How are you? Yes, I'm really good. Thank you. And let's say the weather is getting beautiful now. So yeah, very happy with the change in weather.

I'm good thank you, how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:19.63)
It's beautiful today, very sunny, very nice.

I know. Like you said, it's bit chilly in the office because we are here today at the number five offices, which is, how would you describe the locations? Just near the Pentahotel is probably the easiest description.

Yeah, just across the IDR.

For our audience, could you please just give a bit of a background and introduction to yourself and how you came to work at number five?

So I'm Abby Trussler and I'm the Communications Officer at Number 5. My journey with Number 5 actually started when I was 14. I used the counselling service and I had up to 20 weeks of support. And then when I was 16, I started volunteering as a Young Ambassador. When I was 18, I became the Lead Young Ambassador. And then when I was 21, there was a job opening to become Projects Coordinator, so working with the team. And it meant I could continue doing some of my Young Ambassador work as well within a role in the staff team.

Speaker 2 (01:06.056)
And then last year I got promoted to Communications Officer, so I handle our website, our newsletters, all of our social media, and all of our general comms, both internal and external, and continue working with the Young Ambassadors in that way as well.

How old are you now if you don't mind me asking? So that is nearly half your life you've had this connection with number five so it clearly made an impression on you when you came here at the age of 14.

I'll be 25 in the summer.

Speaker 2 (01:31.936)
It really saved my life. couldn't imagine doing anything that's not number five. And at the time I had no idea what my future could look like. It was just blank and I had no hopes and no dreams and no confidence to achieve anything. So having that support really put me on a path of knowing what I wanted to do and having the confidence to do it. And then being able to do that at the agency that gave me that chance is amazing. I really couldn't imagine doing anything else.

That's a really moving story. Now that leads nicely into what is number five and what does it do for young people?

So, Number opened in 1971 and when we first opened we just like wanted to talk to young people who were struggling with their mental health. We worked with the Samaritans back in the 1970s. We started at 5 Sackville Street, so that's where Number 5 comes from. And then our services grew as demand for young people's mental health grew. So now we support young people with up to 20 weeks of free confidential counselling sessions which are delivered by qualified counsellors. We run a counselling training course.

for counsellors wanting to work with young people aged 11 to 17 because adult counselling training doesn't focus on young people and obviously young people have such specific needs and talking to an 11 year old compared to talking to someone who's 60 is very, very different and you need different skills. Young people engage a lot more creatively and the world that young people live in is so different. So that's something unique that we do in Deliver and on top of all that we do a lot of outreach work as well.

So we have our young ambassadors who create content. We have a Young Voices, we're part of Young Voices working group. And so working with local young people about issues that matter to them and supporting them to do social action projects. And then we also have mental health workshops that we run in schools, but we also deliver them in local businesses as well. So aimed more at parents to support their young people, but also knowing that young people are in local businesses because we support young people aged 11 to 25. So sort of that 18 to 25 year old group might also be in the business.

Speaker 2 (03:31.01)
So it's a nice opportunity and that's where we grow our corporate partnerships as well.

How many people work at number 5?

We have 12 in our staff team, which includes six employed counselors and only three of us are full time. So myself, Carly, who's one of our other lived experience young leaders, and then Alison, who is our lived experience director, are full time and the rest of the team are all part time.

Wow, I mean that is a big impact that you're talking about there for 12 members of staff, only three of which are full time. So yeah, that's amazing. I suppose it's because you're able to tap into other groups and networks, so to magnify your impact.

Yeah, and we have a lot of counsellors on placement as well. So counsellors doing their training to work with young people will do placement with us and also their level 4 placement. And then some of them stay on so they'll do self-employed work with us. So we also have counsellors in six local secondary schools. So they pay for that counselling service as well. So not all the work happens in our building here. It also happens out in the community and like you said with our local partners as well, which is incredible.

Speaker 1 (04:32.718)
are the challenges that are facing young students, young people nowadays? What are the common problems that you're finding?

One of the core problems that we see with the younger age group especially, but also with university students is school and education is quite a big thing. And a lot of that has come out from COVID as well, the impact of COVID and the lockdowns have had on young people. But it was something that we were seeing before lockdown and COVID happened. So we've done a reducing the risk of exclusion project to support young people at risk of exclusion to stop permanent exclusion happening. We run a school transitions project in each April and August.

support those young people. So for some of them, it's going into school can be tricky, especially those with maybe SEN needs. But also, young people struggling between that transition, going from primary school to secondary school is quite hard. You lose a lot of support that you would have had when you were in primary school. There's less one-to-one. You're suddenly in a school with 2000 students maybe compared to being in a primary school where there was 200 of you. So that stems from a lot of things that we see and also parents then struggling because the schools aren't offering.

as much support and general pressure as well. The online world creates a lot of pressure that we see from young people and that sort of plays into the school. Actually, if you are having issues at school, back in the day they used to stay at school, you could go home and you were free of them. Whereas with social media, then still follows you home. But there's also the pressure to keep up on social media, keep posting, keep getting likes, which isn't necessarily true, but that can play into the feelings of anxiety and in the content that they're exposed to on the online world as well.

actually things that maybe only adults would know, engage with the news or they're here at work, young people are exposed to and their brains aren't ready. So that's a big part of it.

Speaker 1 (06:19.33)
Two points on that which I find really interesting. have you noticed a difference between before COVID and after COVID? You said the same problem is school that is still plain an issue. So is it pretty much the same problems? It's just in a slightly different angle. What have you noticed?

I think just more young people struggling with it, especially young people who were told before you have to come into school. And then during lockdown, they were suddenly thrust online and they could do school online. And now you're suddenly told, no, you can't do school online, you have to come back in person. Whereas where you're seeing all the grownups sort of in the real world, as they may call it, they can work at home and they can work in the office. So actually that representation and maybe the arguments in the past as well that you have to be in school because that's...

what it'll be like when you go to work isn't necessarily true either. So also if you're already struggling, maybe your anxiety felt worse when you were at home in lockdown. But also we know that a lot of young people, things happened to them in lockdown. They were at home, they weren't in school where safeguarding was happening. So a lot of things happened that maybe we don't know about and actually going back into school has affected that because the school won't know what happened either. And then some of the injustice as well that young people felt like they were blamed.

a lot of the time, young people are hanging out in parks during lockdown when then we heard other people were doing that too and it wasn't really that big of a deal and stuff like that young people felt like they got the blame and actually they were the most impacted because adults could keep working online but school was happening online sometimes but maybe you couldn't go you couldn't see your friends if you were doing your GCSEs you didn't do your GCSEs you didn't get prom if you were leaving primary school you didn't get to leave you didn't get to say goodbye to everyone

So sort of all of those endings that didn't get to happen as well are then still continuing. So those GCSE ones are now university age and actually trying to work out, did they want to go to uni? Did they not want to go to uni? And sort of facing those transitions again. And it'll be their first time doing studies for some of them because they did A levels. They were maybe made easier for them in a way and the school offered more support, but the university won't be offering that support either.

Speaker 1 (08:29.614)
And like you said, it's a whole different world and there's no, like you said, closure for them. The other thing that I was going to ask you about is have you seen the recent adolescence program that's on Netflix? I quite a few people have mentioned it. I think the shocking thing is, like you said, this taking something out of school and something is turning online and then you have these conversations going on that the parents and the adults, they don't know what these conversations actually mean. So it's like a whole different language. What are your thoughts on that program or is it reflective?

think it is reflective and it's a reflective of quite an extreme example, is what sort of invokes all the emotion in us. But it is very much true that adults don't have an idea of what goes on on the online world and that perceived that a conversation could mean something positive, but it doesn't. But also that that's what's confusing for young people. If you're not in a space where, for example, the Manosphere space where they're using those emojis to mean those things, but yet you'll get in those comments.

You don't really know what it means because you're not engaged in that space, but you know it's something bad or something negative or something that you don't want to engage with. And you could report it to Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or wherever it is that you're seeing it. But because it's bots that run the checking, they'll go, no, they're not saying anything bad. No, that's not harmful content. And where do you go with it then? Because if you tell your parents, they're probably going to tell you off and you're going to get in trouble.

because they'll think you did something or you see harmful content. The example is that you could see content of someone potentially self-harming and they'll assume that you've searched for that content, but that's not how the algorithm works. could be that it's to a trending song or something that you previously liked as an example. But if you would go to your parents, they'd probably tell you off, take your phone away, but that doesn't solve the problem at the end of the day. So it's sort of a two way that young people need to be able to have the conversations, but it shouldn't be on them to start them or to train the adults and how to talk about it actually.

there is some education that needs to go on. And I know I was part of the first generation that had social media. So we were sort of let loose. And I look back now like, why did you do that? But I'm like, no one was there to tell me not to or to teach me how to protect myself.

Speaker 1 (10:37.262)
Yeah. And the thing is that obviously social media is there to stay. You don't realize or take it in so much that what you do at 14, 16, if it's part of your same social feed when you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, it's still there for people to go back or to see, you know, track your online behavior. So it has repercussions for the rest of your life, basically. Yeah. Unless you totally change your name or your identity, which let's face it, not many people are able to do. What can adults and colleagues

Parents, what can they do to help young people then?

think a lot of it is just having a conversation with them, but making it clear that it is a conversation, it's not a telling off, and listening is probably the key thing. Instead of jumping in when they say something, sometimes young people might already have had a solution on something or an idea of what they want, and I think as adults maybe sometimes we try to fix the problem for them, and sometimes that's not what they want. So it's especially good to ask maybe, what is it that you want? You just want me to listen, you want me to help find a solution, or you just...

telling me to get it off your chest and to keep checking back on things but not to regulate it both sort of the online world and just in a general sense. I remembered when I was struggling with my mental health, if people were asking me all the time that are you okay, are you okay, are you okay, you're not gonna engage because it just feels like they're just trying to get an answer out of you and they're constantly checking on you and it just becomes something else that just adds to the pressure of everything. So sort of intentional and giving them space to talk about things when they want to.

but also knowing that if they don't want to talk to you but maybe they want to talk to someone else that's okay and you haven't failed as like the trusted adult in their life because young people need to talk to other people and actually it might be because they're thinking of you that they don't want to talk to you but with our young voices we did some video content and one of my favorite things that they said was sometimes we say it isn't the phone but sometimes it is the phone that is the problem which I liked because they know when it is the problem

Speaker 2 (12:37.474)
But because so often they're told it always is the problem, they don't want to admit sometimes when it is because it feels like a I told you so moment and that's not what they're after.

So how do you connect with your different audiences? Like you said, you are working with young people, that's the main goal, but you also work with adults and other stakeholders as well. So how do you communicate with all these different groups?

So a core of communicating is on social media. So our Instagram and TikToks focused more at young people because that's where we know they are. But our LinkedIn and Facebook is more aimed at parents and professionals, so like schools, our corporate partners, because that's where we know that they are. So we sort of tweet the content, but we try to share content that works for both audiences because if it works for young people and it's written in a young people friendly way, it's more accessible to adults because also we know that...

like English isn't everyone's first language. So sort of keeping content simple is our best way forwards. We also do a monthly newsletter which goes out to young people but it also goes out to our supporters and goes out to parents. So we try to do a mix of content in that as well. So content aimed at parents. Our newsletter went out yesterday actually this month and we had a blog in there. So it was, why am I angry for young people? And then a blog for parents that was about supporting your young person when they feel angry. So sort of getting that twofold approach.

And then a lot of our in-person events as well. So we go to outreach events and different fundraising events and going in and speaking to our corporate partners and at the schools. It's sort of the key way we speak to parents and then our clinical team also engage with parents of young people on the waiting list. So they often speak to them on the phone and sort of that ground, the person on the ground that gets to speak to them and gets a bit of insight as well. So we can know what it is that the parents are struggling with and then we can share that back, which is sort of where the idea for our podcast then came from.

Speaker 1 (14:27.534)
going to ask you about your podcast because what I really like about your podcast is the approach. This isn't just you are talking to young people, it has a different angle. Do want to explain the podcast project that you've got coming up and what it is?

Yes, of course. So in the summer, we plan on launching our podcast and each theme is going to have three episodes to it, where there's one that a young person is going to speak with one of our counselors, and then going to have a parent speaking with the counselor, and then one with a young person and a parent speaking together about different themes. So some of the key ones we've identified are around school, the online world, and then just common themes that we see young people struggle with. So anxiety, sleep, anger as well.

to get that professional approach but also lived experience voice in it as well and sort of keeping young people at the centre but knowing actually parents need support too and what's the easiest way that we can reach more parents whilst it still has that professional voice in it. So that's where the podcast came from.

And I remember asking you before about this and why you decided, like we said before, about having to connect with your audiences. And this is actually something that you said young people have requested, isn't it? So you're listening to what they want.

Yes, we've heard it from a lot of young people and also a lot of parents. I was recently at a workshop at one of our corporate partners and they said, oh, it'd be really useful if you had content like this that was just available in like a podcast format. And I was like, funny, you should say that because we have that planned. But it's nice to hear that you want that because that's really helpful to know that this is what you want and need and that you could maybe listen to it together in the car was what one of them said, like the episode of a parent and young person actually. You could put that on on the car on the way to school together and

Speaker 2 (16:01.932)
make it a bit of discussion topic as well on the drive home.

Yeah, so you're actually using this content to bring people together, which I think is a wonderful thing. One of the things that is hard for groups to do is they tend to be of an older age and bringing the younger people together with the older people is something that lots of people I think struggle with. So that's what you've been able to do perfectly. So I wanted to get first of all your thoughts and tips on how groups can make it more accessible and how they can connect with younger people.

when obviously for some people it may be a bit awkward. So how would you recommend they do that in a nice accessible way? And then I really like that the podcast is something that is there for young people before they actually get into counselling. So you're servicing them and helping them at every stage. You've got your blog content, then if they're waiting for counselling, they can listen to this as like an initial pre-step. So there's a lot of information there. So I'm just going to fire that all at you.

Just touching on the bit about the podcast, that's one thing that we try to do with all of our communications and the projects that we run as well, are often that gap in between counselling. And sometimes it means that then when a young person gets their counselling sessions, because we do unfortunately have a long waiting list, it means that actually maybe they don't need as much support as they would have because they've already had some level of support. And we also find they're more engaged in their counselling because they've had some interaction with us and they sort of have the hope that this is going to be more beneficial than maybe

past experiences that they've had. But engaging with young people, we sort of take it from a co-production point of view and that makes it sound a little bit more professional and less scary to both adults and young people. We tend to start with doing surveys is our key way. So getting young people's voices in because that you need to start somewhere. And that will often give you a sense of are we even on the right path? And it's sort of backwards because the best way to do that is to have young people's input.

Speaker 2 (18:02.21)
from the get-go, but that is something that our Young Voices group do. They work together with local partners to help get voice in and maybe go, you're not asking the right questions. But a key bit of it is to have young people not be a token. I think too many times young people feel like they're asked for their voice and asked to share their experiences and they do and it's just ignored. So being clear as well what the outcome is, even if you're not sure.

they appreciate the honesty and the openness, you go, well, this is what we hope to do, but we'll keep you updated, is much better than, yeah, we're gonna take that feedback on board, and then you don't hear anything about it ever again. Keeping it open and honest, and where you can, remunerating them for their time. If you pay a professional time to feedback on a service delivery or a model that you're working on, why would you not pay a young person? Because they're an expert in their own way of being a young person, so actually paying them back in their time.

sometimes it doesn't have to be money, they might just be happy with some pizza.

I think that's a great approach. I'll use that pizza thing going forwards then. Is there anything that you'd like to leave our lists with? Any thoughts, any young people who are out there struggling or adults who have got young people in their life who ask, you know, they'd like to help them, but they don't know how?

think our key message always is it's okay to not be okay. There's nothing wrong and you're not alone in feeling that way. I remember I always felt alone and I think at times my parents felt like they were alone with me struggling but there is always support out there. Whilst everywhere does have long waiting lists, we're not going to glaze over that fact. There is support out there and there are people who want to help and it might be in different ways. It might not always be counselling. There's a lot of supportive content out there.

Speaker 2 (19:45.238)
and often there's people at the end of a phone line who will be able to tell you where to go even if you're not sure.

Abby, I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and yeah, keep on doing the good work that you're doing at number five young people.

Thank you so much.