It’s project time

Tagged with capacity building | families | platform | TACSI

Most of our recent blog posts comment on other people’s ideas, rather than offer up our own. Our excuse? We’ve been doing all the behind the scenes work to make our first project with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation happen. Well, it is happening. We’re working in, with, for, and between families in South Australia to create some sort of platform that enables more families to thrive and fewer families to spiral into state intervention. You can read more about the project content on TACSI’s website.

Here, on the InWithFor site, we want to offer a running commentary about the project process, and how the cultural and political context we’re in shapes the solutions that emerge. We know there is a lot of work in the ‘families space’ around the world right now, including at Participle where we worked last year. We’re looking forward to collective sharing, thinking, and doing. In a space as complex as the family, there is no single solution.

One of the reasons we started InWithFor was to learn about how to do innovation in different places, with different histories, and different capacities. Already, we have experienced some big differences between the UK and Australia, in terms of how communities and institutions engage. It’s really clear from our early shadowing of social services in South Australia that co-creating another service or program is not going to be the answer.

That’s why we’re using the word platform in our project description, rather than service. We think we need to co-create something that existing organizations, businesses and institutions can plug into, and that can change how they work with families to grow and learn over time. A platform would be able to focus on the common outcome (family thriving), organize support in a different way, provide feedback to families, model interactions and experiences with families, run collaborative commissioning, be more systematic about the kinds of practice that works when, etc.

If we’re aiming for some kind of platform thing, then figuring out how to bring practitioners and organizations along for the journey is critical. How do we serve as enablers of innovation, rather than just doers of it? We’re not really sure yet. We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences: how have you devolved responsibility to others to innovate and improve outcomes? When those people haven’t experienced innovation before, how have you trained and supported them to know what’s possible and what good work looks like?

One way we’re trying to build local capacity is by establishing a different kind of project team. Our third project leader is seconded full-time from one of the big government departments here. And we’ll be setting up some local action learning groups with practitioners and policy people to learn and experiment with us every step of the way.  But, these are just structures.  We need to fill those structures with something substantive–a kind of curriculum and pedagogy. This is what we’ll be working on over the next couple of weeks… Stay tuned.

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families TACSI outcomes prototyping co-design social innovation design thinking older people measurement Family by Family ethnography Participle health logic models behaviours capacity building innovation teams learning young people thriving ideo innovation ageing transitions social impact social entrepreneurship social problems education cross-cultural IUHPE