We’re in month three of our family project with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. It’s always amazing to me how different each month – or even week – can feel. The top-down and bottom-up nature of our work means that some weeks we’re working directly with families, and other weeks we’re translating what we’re learning to people who work with and for families. The last few weeks have been all about translation: to practitioners, managers, and policymakers across the health, education, and child protection spaces. That’s prompted us to tighten our story, and figure out what exactly we want to communicate. Probably the biggest shift in our story has been what we mean by thriving families.
We started the project with a broad, pretty ambiguous aim: increase the number of families thriving and decrease the number of families entering the child protection system. Initially, we saw ‘thriving’ as the end outcome: the ‘thing’ that families would achieve. Our deeper work with 35 families – in particular our work with aboriginal families in Port Augusta – helped us to see that thriving was actually a way of living, not an end state.
Families who were thriving had different ideas about the kinds of lives they were after: some talked a lot about education and achievement, others talked about community connectedness, and still others focused on being independent and self-reliant. Thriving was about how families got towards these kinds of lives. Regardless of their version of the good life, thriving families had some similar mindsets and behaviours: they invested in self-development, introduced new experiences into their routines, brokered family members to stuff outside of the family, etc. Next week, we’ll put out a report that spells some of this thinking out, and most importantly, highlights the opportunities for enabling thriving behaviours and mindsets. The report is very much a work in progress.
But describing what’s led to our shift in thinking is, in many ways, more important than the thinking itself. For us, success is enabling practitioners and policymakers to think and do different. I’ve learned from past failed projects that practitioners and policymakers have to discover how to do that for themselves. I’ve often tried to circumvent the ‘self-discovery’ process: I’ve wanted my ‘ah-has’ to substitute for people’s own ‘ah-has.’ It just doesn’t work. We’ve just set up two action learning groups running alongside our project work to give practitioners and policymakers the space to have their own ah-ha moments. As a control freak, the scary part is that practitioners and policymakers might not have my ah-ha moments. They might come to a different conclusion. But, success in the context of these action learning groups is bottom-up experimentation: giving people the permission, the time, and some tools to reconsider what they do every day from a different perspective. We just have to hope our inspiration points, from the families we’ve met and international examples, prompt a few new brain waves.
The theory is that it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and not critically question what we do. In action learning groups, each participant picks a project and over several months tries to reframe the project, try some new strategies and approaches, reflect on the actions thy have taken, try some different strategies and approaches, etc. For example, one member of the action learning group has selected ‘service planning’ as their project: they are going through a process of projecting service needs in the future, and want to understand what they might do differently if they interjected a bottom-up perspective.
It’s challenging stuff. But, Carolyn, who has been seconded full-time to the project from the Department for Families and Communities has certainly been an accelerator. It was so much more powerful for action learning group participants to hear about Carolyn’s ah-ha moments than mine. While Carolyn’s ah-ha moments still can’t substitute for participants’ own, they are so much more real. I’ve never worked under the stress and strain of the child protection system, so how could I understand why things are the way they are? That must be going through some people’s heads when I speak. Carolyn’s experiences are so much more closer to home; that, and she has a pretty remarkable ability to talk about stuff in language those entrenched in the system will understand.
One of our collective ah-has this week was that the system mirrors many of the families we’ve met: families under a whole lot of coping stress who focus on self-preservation rather than self-development as a means for survival. Because the risks in child protection are so high, there can be a do-as-your-told culture that is strikingly similar to the culture in households just managing to get by. That’s led us to think that some of our opportunities for families are the same opportunities for the system.
Next week, we’ll be working up materials to share these hunches with families and with the system. It’s time to take the ideas out of idea world and make them a little more concrete; to shift again from thinking to doing, and from translating to direct working…
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