“I grew up in poverty, I was one of six children in a little mining village, squeezed in a three bedroomed council house.”

All staff at Family Gateway have lived experience of the issues they tackle, including its Strategic Director, Pauline Wonders.

“My parents didn’t have anything,” Pauline said. “By the end of the week, it was often sugar sandwiches or tomato ketchup sandwiches because there was no money left.”

Pauline worked hard at school, determined to escape that life. With no money for university, she decided to train as an accountant, ‘as there was money in that.’

Bringing up two children, she got her qualifications and worked in the NHS, rising to Deputy Director of Finance at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hospitals, managing a £285m budget.

She got to a point where she wanted to try teaching, a path that led to her writing a bespoke foundation degree for the Tyne Gateway Trust. She sat on their steering committee.

Tyne Gateway Trust was part of the council’s child anti-poverty unit innovation pilots in 2009.

“At the time, child poverty was going through the roof but there was money being ploughed into social care and clearly it wasn’t working. So, these innovation pilots were invited to respond with different approaches. We put together a proposal on the basis of the Barefoot Professional model, which means your staff have lived experience of the issues and you professionalise them in the roles.”

They trained local parents who had overcome difficulties of their own, from homelessness to domestic abuse.

“They didn’t necessarily have qualifications which wasn’t our priority – what they did have was an innate desire for other people not to live through what they’ve lived through.”

After two years, it showed real success, but the money and pilot came to an end.

“The steering group said, ‘let’s put this project in a drawer’. Myself and some others said hang on a minute, you can’t do that. It’s been hugely successful, the outcomes are incredible, why don’t we just set up and run it as a charity or a social enterprise? So that’s what we did. In 2011, the charity was established and we had the salaries for the community entrepreneurs underwritten by the council for a year, and after that we’d have to be self-sufficient.”

The charity, now called Family Gateway, added a social enterprise a few years ago, with a community hub, cafe and catering business, contributing to an annual turnover of up to a million pounds.

Its 27-strong staff provide intensive support to 350 marginalised families a year, with multiple and complex needs at risk of crime, eviction or having their children taken away. It takes time for their Family Entrepreneurs to initially build their trust and get them to acknowledge their issues, such as mental health or addiction, before starting to build a plan to address them.

“The trick then is to help them help themselves. It sounds twee, and it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

“We’re working with a lot of young people on the edge of crime, that involves real patient conversations, getting to understand them and engage in diversionary activities, even go for a walk and open up about what’s holding them back. It could be any manner of things.

“A lot of these families don’t have just one issue, they have seven or eight, and they’ve often been let down by services so many times, or are fearful and they really don’t trust or have the confidence to move themselves forward.

“The ultimate objective is to get the parents into work, but there’s a lot of pre-employability work to do first.”

Going to their homes is integral to the work, as many are hard to engage.

Income comes from schools who pay them to engage children who don’t attend or achieve, and from grants, as well as their trading arm.

“The social enterprise was just starting to pick up before Covid, with a couple of corporate clients, regular footfall in the café, a takeaway service, and then Covid hit.”

Their large community centre lost trading income as tenancies and exercise classes stopped. Income became unstable, but need shot through the roof.

“The core charity work has been more critical. In Covid, conflict in the home went through the roof. We secured some work with the Police and Crime Commissioner around young people and their emotional and mental health around anti-social behaviour, a lot of that was abuse in the home by teenagers.”

They used their facilities to offer a free family meal service, kickstarted with donations and grants, and did doorstep visits.

“In a year we’ve delivered over 72,000 free meals to families for the whole family. They have three meals a week, made at our premises, chilled and delivered to their door, with a bag of fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Driven by the hard work and home-grown vegetables, often needed to be balanced with ketchup sandwiches, of her childhood, Pauline is determined to address the serious malnutrition and obesity issues in the North East.

“We’ve done some evaluation and assessed the food, and they’re snacking less, spending less, and are less stressed, as well as having a better idea of nutrition. The children love bananas and apples, they never did before.”

Delivering free meals was also a way to do welfare checks on their families, all their Family Entrepreneurs are trained in safeguarding. The team also used WhatsApp group calls and video calls to keep the same level of engagement.

“The hope is these good habits will continue when the café re-opens, with an offer of cooking classes.”

Key Fund gave £37.5k grant from the Social Enterprise Support Fund, primarily to fund the post of a Head of Community Business, who is also a Michelin-trained chef.

“He’s really taken us to the next level,” Pauline said. The aim is to be less reliant on grants, and creating a quality offer, with a strategic plan to use enterprise and community to support the charity.

“I want it to be the best catering social enterprise in the North East. It will allow us to increase our social impact.”
Pauline’s aim is to get children in poverty interesting in food, picking vegetables from their garden, and interested in food and cooking, to break the malnutrition cycle.

“Without the funding from Key Fund, we would have stumbled along. It allowed us to take that risk and do something we might not have done, because of the timing and not knowing what the funding landscape will be next year. It was absolutely critical. I don’t think we’d be where we are now without it. I really don’t.”

“The drive for me is that if I don’t drive this business to be successful to generate income, we won’t exist, and if we don’t exist, who else is going work with these families because nobody else is doing this?”

The job is ten times harder than her Deputy Finance job, but she says, it’s ‘the right thing to do’.

“It takes me full circle. I was that little girl standing in the free school meal queue, the only one out of my friends. There was a real sense of injustice, and here I am now helping to remove some of those injustices.”