Statement on Our Future Sustainability and Continued Commitment to Young People with Additional Support Needs

7th February 2025

The Usual Place will celebrate its 10^th Anniversary in June 2025 and has been at the heart of our community in Dumfries & Galloway for a decade: transforming lives and growing stronger.  Built in response to the voices of young people who would otherwise be marginalised and unseen, we have expanded to meet their needs – providing opportunities where none existed, replacing invisibility with empowerment, and enabling young people to build a life, not just receive a costly, and often, inadequate service.  Without our support, many of the thousands of young people who we have worked with would face a future reliant on institutional care.  But instead, they are thriving, contributing and shaping a more inclusive society for us all.

Our work is not just about individuals – it is about cultural and attitudinal change, challenging perceptions and influencing decision-makers to create a more inclusive future for all young people with additional support needs.

We are more than a café; we are a unique skills academy where potential is nurtured, confidence is built, futures are shaped, and an inclusive workforce is created. Young people in Dumfries & Galloway are entitled to free higher and further education.  It is distressing that we are even having to consider charging young people tuition fees because they are disabled.

At The Usual Place, our mission is simple yet life-changing: to create opportunities for young people with additional support needs to contribute, grow, and be recognised as valued members of their communities.

Our work is widely recognised as best practice in both national and local forums, and we are regularly consulted by decision-makers, including the House of Lords Public Services Select Committee 2024, the Scottish Government Economy and Fair Work Committee Inquiry into the Disability Employment Gap 2024, and all Dumfries 2024 general election candidates. We have also collaborated on published research with The National Centre for Resilience and The University of Glasgow.  Our impact is undeniable—young people, given the right support, don’t just participate in their communities; they enrich them.

However, despite our national reputation and the overwhelming evidence of our success, we face an undeniable financial reality: we will never be able to make enough cups of tea to cover all our costs. While our café, venue hire, and events serve an average 3K customers per month and generate around £250K annually—growing year on year—this is reinvested entirely into our charitable aims. Rising costs, including a projected £25K increase in National Insurance and £26K in Real Living Wage costs from April, alongside inflation in the costs of produce and utilities, are creating financial pressures we cannot ignore. Despite our commitment to innovation and sustainability, our limited access to statutory funding and reliance on a complex web of over 12 funders make long-term financial stability increasingly challenging. Despite difficult decisions, we still face a significant funding gap for 2025-26 and anxiously await the outcomes of pending applications.

After thorough consideration, the Trustees have made the difficult decision to restructure our staffing and focus on our core charitable aims. This means:

• Prioritising our core work—providing life-changing experiences and citizenship opportunities for young people with additional support needs through our café and events venue.
• Halting wider projects, such as Good Connections for Autistic Adults and Autism Awareness Training. These initiatives have been incredibly valuable, and while we hope to return to them in the future, our immediate priority must be securing the long-term sustainability of our core mission.
• Continuing our commitment to autistic young people—many of whom are central to our training and learning programmes.
• Strengthening our newly developed Employer-Ability Mentorship programme—funded by The National Lottery Young Start Fund—connecting young people and potential employers and providing vital support during the transition into work. With Dumfries & Galloway facing one of Scotland’s largest Disability Employment Gaps, this work is more important than ever.
• Scaling back additional enterprises, including withdrawing from our new enterprise at The Studio Café, Gracefield Arts Centre, where the current staff will continue to work under new management.
• Reducing office space related to our wider projects.

We are heartbroken to be entering a redundancy process, which will see our team of 31 wonderful and dedicated staff reduce by 6.03 full-time equivalent (FTE) posts, this may include staff members with a disability. Among these reductions are 2.6 FTE mentoring roles—roles at the heart of our work, providing hands-on guidance to young people. However, our Trustees have worked tirelessly to limit these reductions, ensuring that our core training and mentorship remain strong.

To protect our mission, we are also continuing to make carefully considered operational changes to enhance both the learning experience for young people and the service we provide to our customers. These include:

• Introducing table service technology to streamline and improve the customer experience while advancing employability skills in a supportive, inclusive environment.
• Adjusting our approach to front-of-house mentorship to create a more realistic and sustainable training model.
• Introducing structured placement and training charges for schools, bringing us in line with similar services.

Our Future: Stronger, More Sustainable, and Still Here for Young People

None of this changes what truly matters: The Usual Place is, and always will be, a place of opportunity, empowerment, resilience, and inclusion. The young people we work with, their families and the café customers who support us, should feel very little impact from these necessary adjustments. However, the sustainability of The Usual Place is fundamental to our ability to commit to taking on future cohorts of young people.  It is vital that the organisation can be confident in funding full programmes of training.

This year marks 10 years since The Usual Place first opened its doors, directly responding to the voices of young people with additional support needs.  At the Youth Matters Conference 2011, young people made it clear – they wanted the same opportunities to learn, work, and contribute meaningfully as their peers. A generation later, their priorities remain strikingly similar, reaffirmed by over 100 disabled young people at Youth Matters D&G 2022.  However, this time, they took leadership roles in organising the conference and it’s format.  They demonstrated that, far from heading towards an invisible and marginalised future, their confidence, intentions and expectations have grown – especially among those who have participated in programmes at The Usual Place and its partner organisations. Their progress is powerful evidence that our approach works, young people are becoming stronger, their aspirations are being realised, and the demand for inclusive opportunities remains as urgent and life-affirming as ever.  As we celebrate this milestone, it is vital to continue meeting these powerful needs with a strengths-based approach and ensuring every young person has a voice and the chance to thrive.

Over 10 years, we have supported over two thousand young people, many of whom would have otherwise been marginalised and unseen. Our motto is ‘creating a life, not a service,’ and through our strengths-based, needs-led approach, they have gone on to be active, engaged contributors to their communities, shaping a more inclusive society for all of us.

We know these challenges are significant, but we also know that with the strength of our staff, our partners, funders, volunteers, supporters, café customers, and our community behind us, we will overcome them. Your continued belief in our work is what makes all of this possible. Together, we will emerge stronger, more resilient, and ready to support the next generation of young people.

Trustees Inspired Community Enterprise Trust (The Usual Place)

We would encourage anyone who would like to support the work of The Usual Place to send messages of support and stories of the ways in which our work has made a difference to you, someone you know, or someone who may need us in the future.  A powerful way to help would also be to email your MP, MSP and local councillors.