Putting relationships first: Seeing people as the solution not the problem
The topic discussed was: seeing people as the solution, not the problem, acting as enablers, seeing people not as consumers or beneficiaries or vulnerable but as citizens who help create the changes they need and can often lead the way, and present those we help as having agency and potential, rather than problems.
The first opening speaker was Edel Harris, the CEO of Mencap, who spoke about her own experience as a mother of her disabled son, and told us about the steps Mencap is taking to be genuinely led by people with learning disabilities and how they are engaged in co-production and personalisation of services.
The second speaker was Alison Navarro who drew on her wide experience, including as CEO of Community Action Sutton, to emphasise the importance of asset-based community development and community organisation and power, with the use of emergent thinking and storytelling and the sharing of lived experience. She stressed that you need to focus on the change we want to see, not the problem and talked about the particular value of safe spaces for people with lived experience to open up, facilitated by people who can help use their experience as a catalyst for wider change.
Key points made in discussion were:
We need to focus on the change we want, not the problem, start looking at what’s strong, not what’s wrong.
But we are driven by a deficit culture. People with learning disabilities, for example, are as diverse as the rest of us and have many different assets but are too often defined by their condition and in order to campaign for Covid vaccinations for them campaigners had to define them as vulnerable.
Teams that are part of the community and include community members in them can be powerful.
Asset-based community development is one way forward, using techniques like emergent thinking, story-telling, the sharing of lived experience, training local people to be community led researchers, creating safe spaces, community power and organising.
‘Leading from behind’, carrying out a facilitator role, putting the beneficiary in a position of power, starting at grass roots and working upwards, is part of this. Emergent thinking means sharing learning together.
Relationships are key to this new model – we need to create new ‘relational spaces’ – and assume that everyone starts from a position of good intent. These need to be places of safety. As you open up new spaces, you open up new needs.
Buurtzog is one model of empowered teams enabled to empower those they work with. Large organisations can do this too – eg Mencap – if broken down to lots of individual human relationships.
This approach needs lots of attention to detail and small things, building relationships one to one. You need to take one chunk at a time.