We’ve been so excited about our latest big project working with Care City and Community Resources. Three organisations, all collectively trying to — innovate to address one of the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham’s biggest challenges: helping people who are feeling isolated to find their way to building new friendships.
Our work in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) is being delivered in conjunction with — Care City and Community Resources on behalf of the BD_Collective, funded by LBBD Council. We’ve been funded by LBBD Council, the Better Care Fund and the Ageing Well Programme to help people make a difference.
The question we’re trying to answer is ‘How can we wrap the strengths of a community around a person after discharge, especially those without family, friends or support networks nearby?’
We helped bring a design led approach in order to ensure that we do the right things at the right times, and bring relationships into the heart at all times.
Why us?
We were brought in to run the design research activities, prep and deliver workshops to bring our creativity and imagination lens to the work and collaborative processes to ensure we design with people at every possible stage. Given the very different nature of this work we were learning on the cuff constantly.
In David Robinson’s outstanding LSE Lecture for The Relationships Project in October this year, he reminded us that in a longitudinal study of women with breast cancer, those with a network of good relationships were four times more likely to survive than those without. That 148 studies of mortality rates across ages, genders, ethnicities, demonstrated that you are 50% more likely to survive any given year if you have strong connections. That building relationships reduces healthcare costs and hospital admissions, even when they’re increasing everywhere else.
If it were a drug, we’d be investing in it
Over the next year in Barking and Dagenham we’re going to add to the evidence. We’ll be working with people who have recently been in hospital. People who are back home (or trying to get back home) but don’t feel like they have the social support they need to feel more confident and build up their wellbeing and health.
- Emily Brook
Read her full reflection here
Rebuilding people’s circles of care?
We’re looking to build a circle of care around people through helping people to invest in trusted relationships to develop their own friendships and get back into the things they care about and matter to them.
Why relationships?
What excited me most about this was the opportunity to really see what we can build now as well as anticipating the future possibilities. The statistics are both alarming and also inspiring because they show that if we all make it policy and practice to do this, we’re onto a winner.
Why the trio?
We’ve been working within a collective, as a set of organizations in one of the first of many ways we do this. This can be a difficult and risky transition for those without family, friends or support networks nearby.
What has our role been?
“Our role has been to support Care City to work with LBBD, the BD Collective and local health and care partners to coordinate an innovative and exciting programme to build a community system resilience model to address social isolation and support recovery following hospital discharge for those who are socially isolated.
We’ve been helping them to think creatively around how programme design, research during the discovery to help understand and shape the problems/opportunities. We’re also supporting to design learning programme and training for the organisations involved, creative facilitation and engagement of workshops, to help with the delivery of the programme.”
Care City’s Emily Brook has kindly already left us a glowing feedback that fills my heart with joy. If anyone is looking for organisations to work with they are doing things and setting up trusting team where magic things can happen then I can vouch the Care City Club is the same. Not to mention Elsepth Paisley from Community Resources — who feels the same — she’d also never worked with a designer in this way before, but definitely would again! Thank you all, I’ve been so impressed with thee ways that BD collective and goes above and beyond when it comes to the very necessary and critical hard work that is needed to bring people with us and work collaboratively and putting communities first again and again through really innovative approaches. How to create thriving communities where people have the sense of belonging and agency which are so vital for our health and wellbeing.
“Working with Alice and Ageable has completely changed my view on the art of the possible when reshaping healthcare. I’d never worked with a dedicated design expert before; I’m not sure I’ll ever want to work without one again!
We’re working across a broad place partnership to try something complex and new. Alice has helped us draw in inspiration from elsewhere, think about challenges through many lenses and, importantly, she’s been crucial in helping people to imagine and believe in something better. Our work will make a difference, and Alice has been fundamental in that.
The creativity, teamwork, trust and joy in our project has made it one of the most enjoyable experiences in my career.”
What we’ve delivered
We’re just in the midst of delivering a whole host of tools and resources to go alongside the vision for the programme of Connection Catalysts. Most of this will be in a sharable format soon — Care City is hosting a space where it will all be brought together — and you can also see the full stories, designed up by Binoli Shah from our research activities here.
What we’ve learnt
/// Process over Service ///
How to deliver a process and an approach over a ‘service experience’ This feels like a lovely reconnection to I’ve done in the past (eek — way back) when I worked at thinkpublic who were instrumental is setting up and developing processes like EBCD where we were really trying to bring in design led processes and wrap them around any team or challenge or opportunity, who can use it to work together — as opposed to designing a specific service/experience to meet any challenge.
/// Radical Reimagining ///
We use this word radical a lot and when we speak to people about their dreams — they are not big asks — no one is asking us for holidays to The Bahamas — people have small and beautifully formed dreams that are often not far from their lives but feels it to them but are met by a system that cannot meet them and deliver them.
Such as:
* Someone to come for a swim with me
* Someone to meet for a cuppa
* Someone to help me get a ramp installed
* Someone to take me to the seaside
* Someone to give me a lift with my wheelchair to a local club
* Somewhere to find people and places I can meet others
* Somewhere to help me get out the house
/// Flipping a system from the bottom up through putting collaboration over competition///
Here we’re trying to bring the design process around a person. Diverse delivery teams getting together see how we can give people the tools they need to do the deeply bespoke and relational approach to supporting people to develop friendships, being brave to ask them to help and prevent them from staying in their cocoons for too long, and begin to imagine a very different life for themselves, they go on and support other people in the way only a community can.
It was a dream project for us — being given the trust and support in order to do our best work with connection, and all the things that matter when designing teams that have each other’s back and bring a range of voices and perspectives. If you are interested in learning more about how Alice & Binoli can be part of your design team or we can build our own to support your organisations next dream — do reach out.
We bring our inclusive, dementia, age-positive, community powered dementia, care, design to your project, or would like to think about how your organisation may like us to bring some design & innovation opportunities. We’d love to chat, we have capacity from now until the end of the end of July. Or after this we’ll have capacity from early September running through to next year.
