Make a Change: Our Impact 2024-2025
“Saying it out loud – it’s hard. But once out, you see it’s not right. There are plenty of other ways to live.”
Our latest impact report shows that Make a Change is transforming the behaviour of people causing harm at the earliest opportunity, connecting survivors with specialist services for the first time, and equipping professionals to respond with confidence to people causing harm.
One in three people causing harm self-referred, which shows strong demand for voluntary early help. But with referrals to Make a Change from outside of the areas we operate in rising by 10% over the last year, investment in the programme is needed to ensure Make a Change can respond to demand and support even more people across the country to stop causing harm earlier.
Reaching more people than ever
Since 2018, Make a Change has been delivered in six cities and metropolitan boroughs, and piloted in eight sites. In September, Make a Change opened the door to referrals in Coventry, where we are partnering with a by and for specialist service for Black and minoritised survivors for the first time. Over the year, we provided 210 people with access to behaviour change and survivor support services. Through our focus on healthcare, we trained and briefed 702 professionals – almost four times more than we reached in the previous year.
Early intervention that works
In Newcastle, where Make a Change undertook a health pilot this year, referrals from health professionals rose to 14% (compared to 2% across other sites). Our data shows that Make a Change frequently connects survivors to domestic abuse services for the first time – 43% of survivors supported had previously never used a specialist service.
Changing behaviour, building accountability
Our 26-week behaviour change programme continues to improve survivor safety and wellbeing. People having trouble controlling their reactions dropped from 82% to 27% by the end of the programme.
Read our full impact report to learn more about our work to enhance survivors’ wellbeing, change the system to make people causing harm visible throughout public services, and strengthen workforce responses to people using harmful and abusive behaviour.