About Relative Strength
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Relative Strength is a not-for-profit organisation that offers empowerment services to children, vulnerable adults, and their families. Our services include Family Group Conferences (FGC’s), Advocacy, and Mediation services, as well as training and consultancy.
Our service aims to empower individuals and families to take control of situations affecting them, and to become key members in decision making in relation to affecting positive change.
We achieve this via collaboration, pooling of resources within the family, and building on the families own unique knowledge and understanding of how they function as a family. Areas where they excel, and areas when support may be required.
We then coordinate that support via the FGC process, and other services.
We ensure that all parties can participate fully in the process, by providing advocacy support to ensure voices, views and opinions are heard and fully considered when making plans.
Where families are experiencing difficulties in addressing concerns due to issues between individual parties, our mediation service can support with resolving conflict, to unify the family for purpose of reform, and refocus to achieve positive change.
About our Founder
Jain Downing has had a long and varied career spanning 26 years working with children, young people, and their families in several different roles.
Jain is a passionate advocate for the Family Group Conference process and the good it achieves for families.
Initially Jain started her career as a sessional youth worker for Wolverhampton City Council, quickly progressing to the role of Cluster Coordinator managing several youth centres and sessional staff.
Jain then took on a role as sibling support worker with Acorns children’s hospice, providing pre and post bereavement support services, before moving on to take up a role within Children's Services at Dudley MBC. Jain was employed to set up and establish the Family Group Conference service, and later moved on to Telford and Wrekin Council to set up their Family Group Conference service – a service that was deemed outstanding in their 2020 Ofsted inspection.
Jain is qualified in Youth and Community work, Bereavement Counselling, FGC Coordination, Advocacy and Mediation, and is currently studying for her BSC in Psychology and Counselling.
Jain was also a member of the national panel for the development of the FGC standards and accreditation representing the West Midlands between 2011 – 2013.
Jain’s aim for Relative Strength is to provided services to public, private, and voluntary sectors, as an independent provider. The Family Group Conference model is built on the foundation of empowerment and independence, and to be truly independent the service needs to stand apart from referring agencies. Jain also wishes to take the Family Group Conference model into other areas where it is not widely utilised, such as youth justice, probation, armed forces, and adult services.
For further information please see our Services page or contact us via our contact page.
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Our Approach
At Relative Strength, we believe that services should be accessible to everyone. We are independent from any decision making, are impartial and our services are voluntary.
Our team of experienced practitioners are committed to providing compassionate, non-judgmental services to help you and your family find solutions to problems, resolve conflict, and thrive. We believe that by working together, we can create stronger families and communities. Contact us today to learn more about our services.
"Jain Downing joined us in Telford and Wrekin local authority in 2017, entrusted with the task of setting up our in-house Family Group Conference service. Jain quickly developed the service and established good interfaces and relationships with various teams across children’s and early help support services. Due to the success of the service, the team was expanded in 2020 and is now fully established and integrated into social care practice within Telford and Wrekin.
Jain was creative in her approach to service delivery, and ours was one of the few family group conference services which continued to operate during the Covid 19 pandemic, utilising templates, and online forums to enable families to still develop safe plans for the care and welfare of their children. Jain developed several projects with the aim to utilise the family group conference model more widely to reach a larger audience, in particularly with our pre-birth team. This enabled more babies to remain with their birth parents where it was safe to do so, or their extended family network. Jain also contributed to the development of our volunteer program, which has now expanded to include parents as peer advocates.
Jain demonstrated excellent leadership skills throughout her time with us, and grew and nurtured the team, who consistently achieve great outcomes for children and their families. This contributed to our success in achieving outstanding status in our 2020 Ofsted inspection.
Jain’s passion and commitment to the service shone through her everyday practice, and Jain and her team have provided outstanding services to the children and families of Telford and Wrekin, and I would highly recommend her services to other local authorities looking to establish or refresh an in-house Family Group Conference service."
Darren Knibbs - Assistant Director of Children Services, Telford & Wrekin Council