Our first family project paper is ready for public consumption and feedback. Let us know what you think!
We’ve been busy writing, revising, and visualising our report of the first phase of the Family Thriving Project (we’re on iteration 11 so far!) and trying some new ways to enable practitioners and policymakers to learn and experiment with us. One of our biggest learnings has been about how to define and measure family thriving.
On Thursday Sarah gave the closing keynote speech to participants at the 2010 IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotion in Geneva. She talked about the potential of ‘working backwards’ and challenged participants to start their own problem solving not in the ‘big world’ but in the ‘day-to-day’ world of Nancy and Mo.
I’m attending (and speaking!) at the 20th IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotions and reflecting on how our work on social problem-solving fits within health promotions versus other fields like social innovation. Lots to learn from both, but neither are the perfect fit.
The latest photos from our family thriving project in South Australia.
Our family learning festival was a success. Not everything worked. We engaged parents and we engaged kids, but we didn’t always engage families. Co-design in and with families is hard work. We have a few hunches as to why…
LOOPS is featured in New York Times and Get-Together is selected for exhibition as one of the most innovative designs of the last three years.
Is spending the week pinning posters to a tree too banal for a highly trained social worker? We were out and about this week getting ready for our Family Festival, raising the question: what does event management have to do with social innovation?
Chinese has been the take-away of choice for the families we’ve shared dinner with this week. We’re starting to see some key themes, and find some new words to describe what we’re doing.
This week, we climbed out of our studio, out of our meetings, out of our cars, and out of our contexts. We had lunches, dinners and coffees with families. Just being with people is always transformational. And it’s been no exception this time around.
Our family project team has grown from two to three! Carolyn joins us this week. Her role is an innovation (and therefore an experiment): a way for us to get better at building the capacity of people within services and systems to do different.
This week we’ve been recruiting families to take part in the first stage of our family project…
We’re now working in, with, for and between families in South Australia to enable more to thrive. The aim is to co-create some sort of cross-community platform, not another service or program. That means we’re looking for ways to support existing organizations and institutions to do different, rather than just doing it ourselves. Do you have ideas for how to do that? We’d love to hear.
Three new-ish publications argue that we should fund public services and social programs based on outcomes, not outputs. We agree, but look at the missing link between outcomes and outputs: people’s behavior.
Innovation spawns innovation. So it is with South Australia’s cool Thinkers In Residence Programme. We wonder aloud what a Thinker and Doer Residence Programme would look like.
Not only we are we moving into a new studio this week we’ve also produced our first TACSI product. The first in a series of ‘Project papers’ that will regularly report on project progress.
Things have been moving remarkably fast here in Adelaide thanks to a genuine appetite for innovation at all levels of the system. [...]
We’re looking for a design grad to join our Adelaide team and help fill up our new studio space.
Now that we’re finally getting to work in South Australia with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, people want to know what we do. Finding a job title that can fit on a business card is hard enough, let alone figuring out how to frame social innovation: is it about problems, methods, solutions, or all three? The Young Foundation’s ‘The Open Book of Social Innovation’ offers one starting point.
The co-design, co-production, co-creation, co-delivery space can get a little co-nfusing, especially as the terms are often used as if interchangeable. In The Challenge of Co-production Nesta’s Lab and The New Economics Foundation explain for us what co-production is and isn’t.
Roger Martin’s book ‘The Design Of Business’ provides a useful model for understanding innovation and has a description of Design Thinking that holds water. One of the few design theory books that’s worth more than you’ll get for it at the second hand bookseller.