Ode to honey chicken

Tagged with ethnography | families | TACSI

It was all about honey chicken this week. We sat around dining room tables, kitchen tables, and perched in front rooms, laughing, sharing, talking, and eating a lot of Chinese food. We’ve also been with moms and dads to school pick-ups, to the store, to appointments, and even hung out around the house watching TV, cleaning floors, doing laundry, etc. No day has been the same.

Some key themes are starting to emerge; themes around ‘managing’ family life versus ‘experiencing’ family life; themes around ‘leisure’ time versus ‘convenience’ time; themes around work as money versus work as meaning; themes around neighborhood support versus neighborhood talk.

From these themes, we’ll start to name what could be different for individuals and families and what change would look like in neighborhoods, schools, services, employers, etc. We’ll also come up with a new way to segment families; grouping families by the resources they have to offer and not just the needs they have.

And families have a lot to offer.  Unfortunately a lot of the ‘social service’ language treats people as passive recipients of professional help. I find the word ‘client’ particularly problematic as it emphasizes a one-way relationship, owned and operated by the ‘service provider’ or ‘worker.’  It’s hard to shift this language, in part, because families aren’t sure what to call us. We’re not service providers or workers, but we’re not exactly neighbors or friends.  Families do see a clear difference between people ‘paid’ to work with them, and people who are just there because ‘they have heart.’ We’re occupying the middle ground, as brokers and facilitators, of new kinds of supports, relationships, networks, etc. We do get paid. And I’d like to think we have a whole lot of heart. As we continue to co-design the solution set, we’ll need to find new ways to break the dichotomy between ‘paid’ and ‘voluntary’ between ‘workers’ and ‘clients’ and between ‘professionals’ and ‘people.’ We’ll need to colour across the lines.

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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