Established in 1984, The Maya Centre is a community-based charity in Islington providing free, culturally sensitive counselling, group work and complementary therapies. The Maya Centre offers support to women on low incomes whose mental health has been affected by a range of experiences including depression and anxiety, violence against women and girls, inequality, discrimination and racism.

Alongside therapeutic counselling, The Maya Centre set up the Women’s Hub wellbeing project to empower women in Islington. The Hub creates safe and nurturing spaces for all women, focusing primarily on those who are most marginalised within society and affected by a lack of voice and agency.

The Maya Centre’s main project funded by Propel is the Women’s Leader Group that offers training to a group of volunteers and hosts a series of local forums to understand the current issues that women face in Islington. They are in the early stages of adopting a systems change approach across its work.

Key take-aways

The following are The Maya Centre’s key takeaways about what it takes to bring about systems change:

• Create bitesize milestones to build momentum so that the overarching goal doesn’t feel too overwhelming, and show a road map, and who and what resources are needed along the way.
• The power of being led by and for the community, drawing on the assets, experiences and connections with the community to make sure the change that you are trying to make is grounded and meaningful to the people you are working with.
• Think about what it takes to adopt a systems change mindset or what culture shifts might be required, e.g. adopting a relational and trusting approach, an emphasis on learning.
• Provide appropriate emotional and wellbeing support when working with people with lived experience: individuals have complex and challenging lives which might result in relapse. Additional support and expertise is required from the supporting organisation to hold volunteers through this process and retain their involvement.

What is systems change?

The Maya Centre’s systems change goal is to encourage better human experiences when accessing services. Through The Maya Centre’s therapeutic support and community engagement, they aim to support and empower women by building their confidence, skills and resilience to manage external demands and create their own change. In turn, they hope that this will create a ripple effect by improving experiences within family settings and the wider community.

The Maya Centre sees systems change as tackling the root causes that impact negatively on women’s lives and experiences, such as looking at the systemic understanding of gender-based violence against women. It was also felt that women could not access integrated services and, therefore, were not seen as a ‘whole person’. The Maya Centre wants services to be more coordinated and to adopt a relational approach to supporting women moving between services, to ensure they don’t get lost in the gaps.

The Maya Centre has been looking at the internal ways of working and cultural shifts required to take a systems change approach − for example, considering whether more power should be devolved to staff to enable greater ownership and autonomy over their work.

There was a consistent and strong emphasis on the women The Maya Centre supports being at the heart of the work they do and how they do it.

The systems change journey so far…

Supported by their Propel grant, The Maya Centre set up a Women’s Leader Group involving women from the local community. As well as training volunteers in project management and influencing, a local forum was set up to provide a space for women to share their experiences and to provide a voice to change local policy and service provision:

‘We aim to leverage this space to lobby funders, politicians and key decision-makers to initiate changes and maintain actions that support women’s rights.’

The Women’s Leader Group highlighted several priority areas including mental health support, addressing violence against women and access to services for neurodivergent children. The conversations centred on barriers to accessing support, and what can be done to improve the experiences of women accessing essential systems.

Through this work, and alongside the therapeutic offer, the centre aimed to:

• Support women to feel empowered, building their confidence to create change in their lives, through designing a journey or pathway that involves transforming women’s experience from healing and recovery to thriving and activism.
• Provide tailored and safe spaces for peer support for minoritised women, e.g. art and drama classes, specific interest groups, community practice healing methods.
• Create opportunities for women’s voices to be heard and use a bottom-up approach to influence change.
• Promote collaboration, working together within and across services to ensure a more joined up access to services and support for women in the community.

The Maya Centre’s approach to systems change has mainly focused on influencing local services and policy makers through the local forums. One recommendation from these discussions was to develop a ‘Hub’ that brings different local services together in one building to enable a more streamlined and holistic approach to supporting the needs of women.

The Maya Centre has also been considering the changes required to its internal culture and ways of working in order to take a systems change approach:

• Reflecting on who holds the power and how this can be shifted: Thinking about relationships between the trustees, senior leadership team and staff. This includes having a clear vision for the organisation that the whole organisation has bought into.
• Encouraging staff to look for opportunities to work in partnership/collaborate with sector partners: Establishing new or stronger connections and links between their own and others’ therapeutic work and community activities.
• Space for healing, reflecting and learning: The organisation has weathered a lot of change. Staff and trustees want to have time to take stock, reflect and learn from this experience, and in time think about how to move forward.

Enablers to systems change

The Maya Centre is in the early stages of adopting a systems change approach across its work. However, they have significant experience of working with, for and by women on which they hope to build, including knowledge of:

• Drawing on lived experience in order to understand the most appropriate and meaningful way to tackle issues being faced by the community.
• Working alongside women who are leaders within their communities and/or supporting women to become leaders within their communities. Helping them to build their confidence and skills in these roles and recognise their own value, while also leaning on them for their help in engaging a wider network of women in systems change work: ‘The best person to create social change is by the person experiencing social change’.
• Celebrating the wins in designing and implementing services that are led by and for women. Hopefully, inspiring other women to see what is possible.
• Drawing on different community practice for healing and recovery from trauma (in addition to the core services), for example, cooking with budget and discussing issues such as the cost of living. Jewellery making and knitting has been a valuable route to recovery through the practical activity of focusing the mind and creating something, as well as the peer support from women coming together.

Barriers and tensions

The Maya Centre’s Women’s Leader Group is currently curtailed due to the organisation’s limited capacity, the lack of long-term funding, and the additional needs of some of the women they support due to the reduced availability of statutory health services. Other challenges they face include:

• Supporting and navigating complex lives: Many of the women involved have been through traumatic experiences and are on a long road to recovery. This can impact on their ability to commit to their involvement in the Maya Centre’s projects.
• Consistency of those involved: A key priority of the projects is to upskill and build the confidence of the women involved to take on volunteer roles in the Women’s Leader Group. This means managing a degree of turnover in volunteers as a result of the positive impact of their involvement and feeling ready to move on.
• Day-to-day constraints stifle collaborative working: Sessional work, target-driven funding, and a lack of capacity to come together all prevent opportunities form connections and work collaboratively.
• Therapeutic services − regulation and service boundaries. It’s necessary to be creative in how to keep boundaries around professional services while also creating spaces for women to have an equal voice and to feel heard.

Future Ambition

The Maya Centre is currently dealing with the symptoms of the system in which women exist. With capacity, time and resources on their side they would like to further their systems change journey by directly tackling the root causes that have a negative impact on the lives of the women they seek to support. This could include:

• Building cross-sector partnerships between VAWG (violence against women and girls) and mental health sectors through the voices of women and experiences of both.
• Advocating for health and support services to take a whole family approach.
• Better collaboration between services to improve women’s experiences of these services.
• Using real time data from supporting women to advocate for policy changes.
• Increasing The Maya Centre’s profile as experts on specific issues impacting on the lives of women, such as violence against women and girls, with an emphasis on the experiences of women from different cultural and language backgrounds.
• Sharing learning with local community groups about the value different healing methods (community practice, wellbeing services and therapy) and how to link them coherently together.

To find out more contact: admin@mayacentre.org.uk  (Tel: 02072818970)

Note: This case study was based on the insights gained from the team at The Maya Centre. We thank them for their time and valuable contributions.

Thanks to Vita Terry from Ivar for writing this case study