Some Co-design Stories by Tim

Activating lived experience in Child protection services

Introduction

So I want to try to tell some stories about Co-design in Camden and the other places where I have worked.  Of course, it is not only my story to tell in definitive form, by any means. In fact, there is a group intimately connected to this story, a  group of parents, young people, professionals (of all stripes) & artists, with permission rights on the events. But this is my take, and as we go on together, and get lots of requests for information about what we have all been up to, tell stories in different forums, together and alone.

I wanted to give my personal perspective as someone who has tried to bridge the local authority + community in order to facilitate some useful conversations. So, this piece of writing is formed of my reflections. Admittingly this is a narrow bandwidth, especially as it sits within a freewheeling field of intersecting positions and the brilliant stories of others. Still, I hope my telling may be a useful one, especially to others trying out similar work. I will include links where I can, so you can see examples. Rather than hitting you with endless descriptions of project activities, I will break what I am writing here down into themes. Folding in together some of the reasons for the work and hopefully some of the learning from it.

When I think about it, allying learned skills and lived experience is at the very centre of the work we do.  Family Group Conference (FGC), for example, with its focus on the collective potential of family groups. And the Family Advisory Board; founded in 2014, a coffee morning i set up in Chalk Farm London for parents to speak about how Child Protection could be improved.  Check out the Camden participation describer document  for more on these methods.

Camden's recent Ofsted Inspection 2022 (Outstanding award)  made the point very well about our efforts to activate lived experience in child protection work.

“Camden’s long-standing use of family group conferencing effectively avoids children having to leave their homes or their family when it is safe for them to remain. This approach goes beyond family meetings. The support of peer mentors and advocates, person-centred meetings and the involvement of experts with experience in shaping the service has created a dynamic and responsive approach to creating supportive networks.”

So Co-design yeah!  link to our Co-design principles getting stuff done with people- parents and young people, older people.  And  I am sure part of the recipe is us being serious about the “R” word.

Relational, which conceives of the individual as a member of a community; relational uses daily practices to change norms, and relational uses the private sphere for public purposes. In this way, our relational activism locates agency in the collective and uses relationships as the locus for change. (reference; my article with my long time collaborator Becca Dove)

It's been fun to be with people.

Co-design, for me, is; Forming a Team and living it out in real-time. 

I have enjoyed sharing space, sharing decisions, growing and seeing the fruits of the labour - things we made happen as a Team. We audaciously imagined  Camden was a village! Camden, a London borough of 250,000 people, and believed that we could know the people there and be available to them! Why not?  Perhaps it has been good that we were brave enough to get moving and meet in that community place, at the crossroads of community, the intersections where people brought different flavours and mixed ideas,  imagining shared futures. The Family Advisory Board started that way. A coffee morning. Simple.

This way of working has allowed us to have sustained relationships with people, meaning we learn together and have continued conversations over time. For instance, working with Kar Man on the Family Advisory Board for 8 years, a member from the first one we held - she now coordinates the sessions. Making meaning by travelling with people to present work done together over the years at learning events, like conferences, has been fun. Deep experience unbound by specific locations or times. We can share in the work rather than it be contained to home visits, Family Group Conferences or advocacy work.*

Space

When I started working as a social worker, there was a separation between the office and community spaces, such as children's centres and village halls. I would either be in the office, visiting people in their homes, or organising FGCs in the community. I remember when some parents in Camden first said they wanted to come into the office and to the town hall. They began regularly coming, entering spaces we thought of as professional spaces for professionals, and they gradually broke down the divide between the office and the community. There was enough room in the Co-design work we were doing for them to define the space. 

I remember on Camden parent's request we organised a feedback session in the town hall. Faye Hamilton, a parent activist, turned up with many parents, friends, and people she knew from the community (loads of em!), all with experiences they were keen to share with the professionals. In some ways, this interaction was outside of our comfort zone (us professionals), but it was necessary. The disruptive effect of her bringing people into that council space generated some hope. Here were people who wanted to share experiences and ideas. Those ideas ultimately led to change. Hopeful disruption. And it felt like it was needed to connect together people and the good intentions of the system world, with its logic of timescales and duty, with the messy human world of community that runs on love. Keeping that bridge open between the services and people. You can see how this played out in the Camden conversations (Link) project.

Yes, in the Camden Conversations co-design, we were trying to build an appreciative consensus around the idea that we are the system! It’s the people in it that have to own it, the harm as well as the good. Leadership, therefore, is about the ability to respond and is not confined to professionals with certain qualifications or roles. We can position ourselves to co-create change and value those in the community that can offer valuable experience and expertise. Our responsibility as leaders is to listen to our ‘village’ and take their lead in what we should care about. What they care about is what we should care about, together.

Imagination

So …really working with people means allowing space for their ideas. When I have brought something too fixed to a session, It often hasn't worked out, especially when what I have is over-directed. I remember a time when I was working with a young person whose family was struggling with their housing. There was tension with his family and with his neighbours, who were complaining about him, resulting in him feeling unsettled in his life. There were some massive foam blocks in the centre where I sometimes worked. At the start of the FGC, I asked the family to work together to create a house out of them. It didn’t work out how I planned, and I was perhaps too prescriptive in my plan for the family. The young person spelt out his name in giant foam and interacted with the blocks in his way. It was his own spin on the activity. It taught me a lesson about leaving the space for other ideas. Especially as a professional with a defined role, you have to work even harder to ‘take off your lanyard’ and scale back professional expectations to open up the space for the people there to use their imagination. Recently, I encountered a really beautiful example of this. I asked people to do a word association game, with the next word leading from the final letter of the last word someone had said - to express how they felt about the group to which we belonged. A dad in the room didn’t want to link the words. His word was ‘dandelion’. He had recently written a poem about it and read it out. The bud is packed together and then released, seeding in new places. This felt like an imaginative and individual suggestion that connected to others in the room. He got to the root of the activity. (pardon the pun) 

I have found that you need people with imagination and we (as professionals as we run the lines and do standard things) sometimes need provocateurs, people with a different angle on the topic. This concept was writ large when artist Seth Oliver of Home — Four Bars created a giant banner emblazoned with the Victor Hugo catchline ‘to love is to act’ That banner caught the imagination for sure, becoming our travel companion. It’s been at a parent activist meeting in a disused café in Kentish Town and in a British Legion hall in Bath. It’s been up the M4 to Cardiff, and it’s made its way across oceans to Turku and Oslo. 

Hospitality

Circles are an important part of Family Group Conference work, of course.

Years ago, I organised a meeting for a young pregnant mother and her family. We sat in a circle and started the meeting by chatting about when the baby was due. The grandmother I remember spoke about how her children were born in the house. I could tell this was a well-known family story. Each family member went round talking about star signs, stories of their births or memories of childhood. It was such a lovely start to the meeting. Each story flowed naturally around the circle. The circle is a way of sitting together and structuring a conversation. Simple structures such as a circle open things (and people) up. 

I started to become aware in my practice of intangible things like atmospheres, created by soundscapes, light and shadow, cosiness, kindness, food and other aspects that work through the body rather than through the mind and which can help foster positive effects in co-design work.  

These films show bringing people together from different parts of the system to talk in circles.

There tend to be pre-cast templates for meetings or conferences in social work, this can be frustrating and limit the learning and collaboration, in my view. The organisational hierarchies can completely determine the agenda, with speakers lining up from the 'top to the bottom' of the organisation in that order. Doing it differently from this has brought a whole lot of extra energy and forward momentum in my experience. For example, for our Valentine's day events about Love in Human Services, the simple idea of having a social worker and parent activist facilitate the whole day really worked well. 

Circles

Roles

Co-design is about teamwork, a strong team has different roles and lots of individual strengths within it. There are the accepted roles of parents and professionals. In participatory research projects such as  Camden Conversations really insightful parents brought learning and thinking about love, justice and a better child protection system for everybody. Different kinds of roles arose. There were ‘storytellers’ there, speaking about their own experiences. There were ‘bonders’ there, people that provided that social glue, ensuring everyone got along. There were also ‘bridge builders’ parents and social workers taking a relational risk, willing to bridge the gap and open up. ‘Organisers’, such as Kar Man, who has taken on the organisation of the Family Advisory board and become a peer researcher. Movement !  as people from pre-defined roles, ‘professional’/parents were finding new ones. Yes, I believe those fixed roles are changing in Camden, and parent advocates are now paid to provide a service. They have gone from being recipients of a service to helping contribute to service design and delivery. If you like; Activated Lived Experience in Child Protection Work. Movement has to be important to prevent systems from stagnating. Value frameworks and intention are important, but so is action in my experience, repetition, and ritual. Keeping up the Coffee morning, the Friday story email, and the WhatsApp group. To Love is To Act. 

 I love this definition of leadership by Nora Bateson. 

"Leadership does not reside in a person but in an arena that can be occupied by offerings of specific wisdom to the needs of the community. So leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual. The individual's responsibility is to be ready and willing to show up, serve, and then, most importantly, stand back. Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it's a zone of inter relational process. Step in, step out.” (Bateson 2016)

In Camden, we talk a lot about relational activism that came from Parent advocate Clarissa Stevens saying I don’t want to be waving a placard outside the high court or outside the council, but I do want to be active in making change, and I do see myself as an activist. 

Who is a Relational Activist? We think someone working with empathy, compassion, the ability to connect and form networks, with an understanding that sustained change happens through relationships, and someone who resolutely rejects the notion that those qualities are incompatible with leadership. 

Creativity is central to work. Whole-hearted and Artful. Creative approach to activities, building and drawing things, and word games. A creative approach overall to the direction of the work. We are working with an artist to provide visuals, such as illustrating Camden Conversations’ findings. We also work with stories, with projects such as Friday Story, as a creative response and a way of mobilising interest in the work. Metaphor has been important as well. The metaphor of the bridge has been significant in FGC and advocacy. We have a fun exercise that includes a ball of wool that has become a symbol of work with parents, representing a network, but made out of wool. We have found ways to use catchy language; and, of course, stories! 

Which are so fundamental   - check out twitter @familygroupmeet #CamdenFridayStory. I believe if you scratch the surface of any community, of any kind,  you'll find simple relational acts making a difference. Shining light on those stories spreads confidence that each of us can do something.  

 "the future lies in the integrity of our interdependence" Nora Bateson

Creativity