Founded in 1995, ESCAPE Family Support is the first and only organisation in Northumberland dedicated to supporting carers and families affected by addiction. We are a small charity, but we consistently aim for the highest standards.
Our people are central to our success. We invest in staff, volunteers, and trustees to ensure continuity and quality. Since 2003, we’ve used the Investors in People framework to assure and strengthen this investment. As a learning organisation and AIM-registered training centre, we deliver Level 1–3 qualifications to volunteers and beneficiaries alike.
We’ve entered the Investors in People 2025 Awards following a year of monumental success, made possible by our team’s dedication to personal development, strong leadership, and teamwork. The IiP framework has been a cornerstone of this achievement.
Key outcomes include:
We celebrate success throughout the year and at major milestones, recognising individual and collective contributions. These moments enable reflection, strengthen our culture, deepen relationships, and showcase our impact on society to key stakeholders and funders, enhancing our reputation and funding opportunities.
Winning Employer of the Year 2025 would be the highest accolade we could wish for and a just reward for the extraordinary people who make ESCAPE a place of hope, growth, and unwavering support.
Our staff are deeply committed to our trauma-informed, person-centred approach. Our IiP Insights Report (2025) praised ESCAPE’s “inspirational leadership”, “authentic culture” and “exceptionally strong and connected team”. We were also lauded for adapting to digital and data-led ways of working whilst maintaining human connection.
To be shortlisted for this award is an honour and true recognition for all the team’s hard work in delivering our Core Mission to empower families including adults, young people and children to improve their mental and physical well-being, reducing the harm caused by addiction, social pressures, and risky behaviours. The team were absolutely delighted when we shared the news with them. This recognition helps sustain staff and managers who have extremely challenging and, at times, emotionally-charged jobs. This joy and pride was felt by the extended ESCAPE family too, with service users echoing the view that ESCAPE staff are truly passionate in all that they do.
We have been able to include the good news about being short-listed in our funding bids which will inevitably strengthen our chances of obtaining funds. The attractiveness of working, volunteering and becoming a trustee at ESCAPE is undoubtedly enhanced when such a level of success is achieved and we will reap these rewards very soon.
We are an ambitious organisation, and this is only possible through the enthusiasm and commitment of our people. In the past year alone we have grown our provision in rural Northumberland by over 28%, increasing access to life changing support and reducing isolation for vulnerable families. The motivation this ‘award level recognition’ gives to the team is invaluable and felt not only by the workforce, but the communities of Northumberland and beyond too.
At ESCAPE sustaining success means remaining people-led, community-rooted and strategically agile. We recognise success isn’t a destination but a continuous journey of learning, adapting, leading with purpose. Gaining the award will bring validation that our employment model, guided by the IiP framework, achieves success through investing in its people.
Over the next 1-3 years, we are focused on building long term sustainability through investment in our people, deepening service quality and reach, strengthening financial resilience, continuing to shape systems and policy that affect the families we serve. Gaining the award will strengthen our ability to attract more funding, which will enable this planned growth to happen. The award will significantly assist in succession planning for senior and middle tier staff as the publicity and national recognition will make ESCAPE an employer of national repute.
The latest IiP assessment highlighted our exceptional leadership, coherent culture and empowered workforce. We scored 6.9 in five of the seven indicators, with all other scores above 6.6, reflecting outstanding levels of engagement, support and performance. This culture of trust and empowerment has enabled ESCAPE to grow with purpose. Staff feedback included many scores of 100%. Our overall scores are far ahead of industry norm and overall norm providing a solid bedrock for us to go forward with confidence in publicising our success.
Empowering and involving our people is crucial to our success. To win this award is the single biggest accolade that will really inspire our workforce and boost their motivation, courage and sense of ownership and lead us to achieve even higher levels of success. It will improve our chances of obtaining more funding thereby enabling us to grow and deliver more services to the people of Northumberland. The raised profile of ESCAPE’s success as a nationally-recognised outstanding employer will bring benefit to the whole of the county.
At the heart of high performing organisations like ESCAPE is the right mix of talent and strategic leadership. We believe that networking with organisations across the country enables us to learn and improve continuously. It also enables us to share our learning and help other like-minded organisations to improve too. We believe that our knowledge gained, experiences and successes are transferable not only across the charity sector but across other small/medium size businesses.
We recognise that our service users often access multiple services across the region, so collaboration is important to us. During the next phase of ESCAPE’s development, we plan to scale up trauma informed services, particularly in rural areas where unmet need is high.
We believe that growing our networks opens up new opportunities for everyone involved. It gives us access to people and organisations that we may never have met, were it not for the Investors in People community. We have a lot to offer too!
These prestigious awards and the associated accreditation are invaluable to charities like ESCAPE. This level of recognition not only boosts the morale of the workforce but supports service expansion and drives sustainability for the future and sends a powerful message to other charities and small businesses.
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