DEMOS

For the first three weeks of this month myself, Hannah, Shawnee, Niamh, Matthew, Celia and intern James have been working in Lewisham, Bristol, and Knowsley. We have been working with young people and parents who live in these boroughs to design new services that will help NEET young people and parents who want to engage more in their children's education. We at Demos believe, and have been saying for quite a while, that people really can contribute to designing service solutions to the problems they face. In this case we posed particularly difficult problems, we might say "complex but not complicated", for example engaging young people who don't currently go to Connexions, or helping people in Bristol to overcome the barriers that are preventing them from achieving their personal goals. The result was more ideas than we could've dreamed of - about 30 innovative ideas in each authority.

At this stage it is hard to measure the ultimate success of our work. However, there are several things that do suggest that this one was a cracker. It is possible to break these down into three categories: actual resulting solutions, process, and the soft stuff how people felt or how it changed their perspective. On all three of these it went swimmingly.

In Bristol an exchange programme was proposed to broaden the horizons of young people living in isolated estates. The exchanges would take place between youth groups based in different parts of Bristol and would focus around the idea of 'urban orienteering'. Another focus of the exchange would be a skills exchange (I'll teach you english if you teach me to be a mechanic) would help tackle skills deficiencies that prevent young people from being able to achieve their goals.

In Knowsley a parent buddying scheme was proposed to build upon existing family learning structures. This would allow new parents to a school to be buddied up with an existing parent to encourage them to come into the school, and to feel comfortable being there.

In Lewisham a Connexions bus was designed, perhaps best described as an Ice Cream Van for Young People's Opportunities. The bus will attract young people to it by having interesting things to do (and by being noisy and colourful, hence ice cream van). Once young people are there they will be able to engage in taster sessions for the various opportunities that are available to them in Lewisham. The idea being that that that will reduce their barriers to engaging in these programmes. The bus will also, to a degree, function as a one-stop-shop for advice and guidance (after all, it is Connexions) thereby helping to address some direct service needs.

The process we used can in part be judged by its outcomes, but, I'm afraid, more about that later - look out for our publication in August. However, briefly, each week was broken down into two days of workshops, and then further testing and iterating a final service plan. Some of the things people said about our process and how working with us made them feel and changed their perspectives were:

-“I liked that we didn’t have to write, you used pictures or let us dictate. I wasn’t very good at writing in school”

-“I went home and thought up some more ideas, can we still add them?”

-“I just thought the Council sorted stuff out, like cleaning graffiti and collecting rubbish, I didn’t know they did projects like this. Now I see - the Council is everyone”

- “The Council usually just do what they want to do and it don’t work”

So with all those comments ringing in our ears we returned to Demos to get down and dirty with turning all this Action into some hard words to spread the word that not only is user-led design a good idea in theory it works in practice.

ps. I didn't say it was easy, though...