What Changing Faces is about and aspires to do

What is Changing Faces about?

We are caring campaigners – supportive, friendly, positive and inspiring as well as forthright, informed, counter-cultural and determined.

Changing Faces is here to help people who have a disfigurement find a way to live the lives they want.

Our ambition is to create an enlightened society, which fully accepts and values people who have a disfigurement.

Our mission is to be recognised as being a source/catalyst for change by:

• Supporting people and families to live confidently and training health professionals
• Educating and influencing businesses, the NHS, schools and the media
• Challenging the public and policy makers to think differently and create a fair society.

Our values are equality, confidence, unity and rigour.

What is our new strategy?

Over the next three years we will aim to raise sufficient funding for our team and our volunteers to become a catalyst for change informed by evidence and user voices through

Changing Lives: becoming a centre of excellence for

• Supporting people and families through our empowering psycho-social and skin camouflage services
  • making them as accessible as possible to people across the UK
  • pioneering, testing and publicising new ways for delivering them such as through online tools and chat, an app or in regular local groups
• Training health professionals by
  • offering face-to-face sessions and e-learning for individual clinicians and teams
  • extending the training and induction of Changing Faces Practitioners in the NHS
• Influencing the NHS by advocating for improved confidence-building services
  • bringing evidence-based arguments to bear in NHS commissioning discussions
  • lobbying for clinicians in key specialties to be trained on psycho-social issues.

Changing Minds: transforming the campaign for face equality into a movement by

• Extending our influence on schools and businesses to create inclusive environments
• Building up a campaigning team to
  • raise public awareness about disfigurement and challenge negative attitudes
  • counter media and public examples of facial prejudice, ridicule and stigma
  • promote examples of people with unusual looks leading successful, fulfilled lives
• Pressing for improved anti-discrimination legislation and enforcement.

How do we envision making these aspirations happen?

We envisage 2016-17 being a year of careful consolidation, thought and development of our Changing Lives work and the start of a gradual and directly-funded extension of our Changing Minds campaigning for face equality. We will grow both these programmes in 2017-18 as we also mark the 25th anniversary of the charity with the first UK Face Equality Day on a date in May. By 2018-19, our centre of excellence will have grown too so as to make Changing Faces a powerful charity that stands up to a world that needs to change.

Annual Plan 2016-17

Our Annual Plan sets out how we will work towards our Strategic Vision over the next twelve months. You can download it as a PDF here.