About Us...
Why does Independence Trust exist?
We exist to help people. You can see from our home page that we work mainly with drug, alcohol and mental health problems, and that means anyone affected by those problems, whether family, friends, the community, or someone who wants help for their own health.
Much of the work is for people who seek it purely because they have a concern and want to talk to someone professional about it, but we also have many different partnerships with different health services and the Criminal Justice system, so referrals may come from those services.
What exactly do you do?
We talk. Not counselling as such, but helping people think about “what makes them tick”, and encouraging positive changes. You can look up the techniques we use: in the main they are “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” and “Motivational Interviewing”. There’s a bit more to it than those two techniques, but broadly that describes how we help; along with practical support: workshops, helping people get back into work etc. If you want to know more, you can view all of the services we provide in the "Professionals" section click here to link to the page.
We make referrals where people need medical help; but we believe that very often, having someone to talk to is vital even when a medical intervention takes place. So when we make a referral we don’t “fire and forget”, but try and maintain contact (as long as that is what the person wants).
Where and how do you offer these services?
Most of our work is offered one-to-one although we do run groups as well. We offer a lot of services from our offices throughout the County of Gloucestershire (you can view these by looking at the Contact Us page), but also work in a host of community settings. It might be possible to go to someone’s home when that’s needed.
Who can use your services?
Anyone. We are actively committed to providing services for everyone who wishes to use them, regardless of their gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, race or religion. We can arrange translation services, or refer to other appropriate organisations where necessary.
What do you expect from people who use the services?
We don’t impose many rules; although of course we do expect that people respect staff, and respect other people using the service (verbal or physical abuse is never acceptable).
The people using our services bring all sorts of different experiences with them and we don’t ask anyone to fit a mould that we impose. In fact, the biggest challenge is often having made the effort to contact us in the first place. So we challenge people to make changes in their lives, but don’t push them beyond what they are comfortable with.
How much does it cost?
Nothing. We are a charity, and seek full-funding to cover our services so that we can keep the cost away from the people who use our services.
“Who are” Independence Trust?
You might expect that our staff are all “ex-users” (or some other horrible term like that), and as an organisation we certainly have plenty of experience of “being there”. We hope that helps us understand; but we don’t believe it is necessary to have “been there” to be able to empathise. Over time we have attracted people from all walks of life across our staff base of practitioners, admin, back-room staff and managers.