REASON PARTNERSHIP

Agency Outline

www.reasonpartnership.com

Reason Partnership was founded in 1981, under the name Richmond Fellowship International. It was originally conceived as the overseas department of the Richmond Fellowship, a charity established to provide care in the community to people with mental health problems in England.

The primary purpose of Richmond Fellowship International was, in effect, to ‘franchise’ overseas both the name, Richmond Fellowship and the particular model of care the Richmond Fellowship promulgated in the UK. This model of care was based on the establishment of half way houses wherein staff and clients would work together to create a therapeutic environment designed to ‘re-socialise’ clients to the extent they could begin to live independently in the community.

From 1981 to the late 1990s, Richmond Fellowship International met with apparent success, with Richmond Fellowships established in France, the USA, Mexico, the Caribbean, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Israel, Malta, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Australasia. However, this apparent rate of success hid the fact that the “international fellowship” was extremely fragile. The reasons for this fragility were two-fold. Firstly, Richmond Fellowship International split from its ‘parent’ organisation, the Richmond Fellowship, in 1991/2, thereby reducing its access to funding for the international operations. Secondly, and more importantly, the 1990s showed that the model of care being franchised to developing countries was inappropriate, except in those countries where Western, Anglophone values and interpretations of mental illness were extant. Thus, by the late 1990s the Richmond Fellowships in France, Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Pakistan had collapsed, whilst Israel, Malta and the USA achieved complete independence. In addition, the Richmond Fellowships in India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia formed an independent ‘forum’, believing that London was providing them with insufficient ‘leadership’.

In 1999, the charity received a grant from the Baring Foundation to bring representatives of all the Richmond Fellowships to London. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss issues of ethnic and cultural appropriateness concerning the Richmond Fellowship model of care. The meeting had a cathartic effect on the international fellowship, exhibiting a deep split between poor countries, lacking the social welfare infrastructure necessary to support half way houses, and the wealthier countries who either had such a supportive infrastructure, or could charge fees to their clients sufficient to cover the core costs of such institutions.

Following this meeting, it was decided that the focus of the charity should be less on building an ‘international fellowship’, treating everyone alike, but on developing more appropriate mental health interventions in countries where resources were scarce leading to massive unmet needs. Instead of our colleagues being treated as mere franchisees of a ready made product, the relationship had to become one of equal partnership where, together, we identified the most vulnerable and, together, designed the most appropriate response to meet their needs.

This approach was adopted in 2000 and continues today. In 2004, the charity changed its name from Richmond Fellowship International to REASON PARTNERSHIP, to cement the changes made. This has resulted in some of our former franchise partners choosing to remain aloof from the changes made, but has opened up opportunities for the charity to work with new partner organisations, adopting new approaches to meeting needs and accessing potential new sources of funding. Where before the charity, through promoting the construction of half way houses, affected the lives of only a handful of clients in any one year, we are now in a position to affect the lives of hundreds of poor people through strengthening community support systems and structures, affecting government policy on the psychological needs of communities in difficult circumstances and dealing with the special needs of vulnerable children and offenders.