Overview
Sector: Social Care
Duration: 10 weeks
Description: Group project with MA Service Design Students
Stakeholders: This project was done in collaboration with Camden Early Help, Public Collaboration Lab UAL, and Camden Changemaker Families.
Supported by stakeholders from The Children’s Society, Citizens Advice, Castlehaven, The Winch, Teacher, Police, Early Help and Transformation Teams in the borough of Camden
Methods Used
Desk Research,
Data Visualisation,
Co-Discovery Activities,
User Interviews,
Insight Clustering and Analysis,
Concept Development, Prototyping,
User Testing.
Summary
Early Help Camden is a network of social services in the UK that aims to provide free practical and emotional support to families with children aged 0-19 to help them tackle their issues at an early stage. However, the prevailing problem in the system was that the underlying needs of the family were not being identified, resulting in them being tossed between various specialist services within this network. The challenge here was to reimagine 'good help' for Camden families post the Covid-19 pandemic. In response to the brief and the problem identified, we designed Grow Together -
a systematic framework for facilitating simple conversations between families and support workers, to help unpack the overlapping needs of a family and form a scaffolding of services around them.
This collaborative project was done end-to-end in a complete national lockdown.
Project
Video
Key Terms
Changemaker Families - Camden Families in the process of seeking help or have previously accessed Early Help services.
Family Workers - Professionals working closely with the family to signpost to different specialist support services.
Referral - When people in direct contact with the family direct them towards social services to take further action.
Assessment - A detailed evaluation of the family’s risks and needs by the social services.
Problem
Space
Through a series of online co-discovery workshops conducted by Camden Council, the Changemaker Families identified several problems in the way Early Help was currently being delivered. I drove the team to carefully analyse the findings of these workshops and we decided to focus on two key problems that emerged repeatedly -
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Most families have overlapping needs and not all needs are identified early
by support providers. -
Due to the varying nature of the needs, families are often tossed between specialist services, adding to issues they are already facing.
Research
Process
System and Journey Mapping
Through desk research, we mapped out the system different services that fall under the Early Help umbrella, their access touch points and the general needs of families to gain a deeper understanding of the system. To find the current gaps, we mapped the ideal journey of a family seeking help, to frame the problems expressed by the Changemaker families.
System Mapping
Journey Mapping
Based on our understanding of the complex Early Help system so far, I took the responsibility to frame question guides to help us interview the key stakeholders surrounding families - teachers, police, GP, community service providers, family workers, council authority.
Interviewees highlighted that -
Contextual Interviews
Stakeholder Mapping
Early Help services were designed for families with low levels of need, however, in reality, by the time families were coming to the door, their needs had escalated to medium or high-level, wherein Early Help services could not resolve their issues.
Key Insights
We critically questioned the stakeholders to discover that -
The current system of identifying and assessing needs was not designed to help key professionals understand the overlapping needs of the families.
Additionally, in reality, Early Help was designed to form a Team Around the Family (TAF), but this was not being practiced due to the lack of connectivity within the different services.
Hypothesis
In order to define our project further, I encouraged the team to code and cluster the diverse insights gained from our interviews to identify the emerging themes.
This led us to our two main problem statements -
How might we enable the service providers to help families unpack their complex overlapping needs?
How might we provide holistic support around these complex overlapping needs of families?
Service
Values
- Former Social Worker
In the design phase, insights gained from stakeholder interviews helped us define the key values of our service concept -
Strengths based approach
Family centred approach
A guided approach
“Families want to be seen through their strengths and not their risks”
“It’s not about telling them what they need, but about asking them what they think they need and building up on that.”
- Health Care Expert
“There is an amazing amount of support that exists, but you need to know where to find it and you need to do your research.”
- Changemaker Family
Service
Positioning
Since our focus was towards identifying the overlapping needs of the families at an early stage, the outcome was positioned between the family and the enabler (Family worker) as they are the first point of contact in the system for the family once the family has been referred to services.
Outcome
Grow Together is a framework facilitating effective conversation between services and families with a focus on seeking growth instead of seeking help.
It is designed to be delivered by family workers in a 3 step framework guiding families through the phases of Reflection, Realisation, and Reach by mapping their strengths, needs and directing the resources of their choice towards them.
The Grow Together approach is driven by the family strengths, enabling the family workers and service providers to identify the complex needs at an early stage through conversational shifts, and co-create a network of resources around these families.
Grow Together Framework
Grow Together Tool
Inspired by the process of growth in nature, the framework is facilitated using the 'Tree of Life', used as a metaphor to identify the strengths, needs and resources that a family requires.
Testing
We tested the Grow Together framework with our Changemaker family, a family worker, and a headteacher. They highlighted that -
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The framework creates a more transparent process of tackling problems.
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The fact that it is co-created could help develop a shared responsibility and speed the process of gaining the trust of the families.
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The evolving nature of the tool was appreciated and that it could work well along with the current assessment process and help gain a comprehensive understanding of a particular family’s situation and needs.
Next Steps
Validation from stakeholders led us to consider the future of The Grow Together framework.
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We are cognizant that it cannot exist in a silo and needs to be followed by a feedback loop in order to measure impact.
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To successfully deploy the framework, family workers will have to be provided the training needed to effectively facilitate the framework with families.
Scalability
In our final service concept presentation with Camden stakeholders, they expressed that Grow Together had potential to be integrated with the formal assessment process, adopting a more holistic approach. The tool can also enable service providers to better coordinate help within the system, and ensure timely delivery of support.
Looking at the framework from a universal standpoint, we were able to test it by populating our own strengths, needs and resources using the tool. Thus, the framework and tool together make for a scalable approach to conversations in various settings.