Creating Conditions to Grow the Good Life
Background and Principles
The Sunshine Project is a design project that explores what is needed
to enable families in hardship to grow their good life.
Timeline
Methodology
The methodology for the Sunshine Project loosely follows a double diamond process for moving through the various stages of gathering insights from a range of sources of expertise, converging on a clear problem statement, generating diverse ideas, and testing them out to ascertain what has worked (or not) and why, and what shows merit for scaling. However, because the families we were co-designing with had very real and pressing needs, we embedded a series of small action research loops to enable us to test out and iterate material supports with families from the outset.
Principles
The design team have used the following 5 principles as a guide when designing prototypes to test out with families.
Centre the Families
We started with the family and their priorities, and their experience of help-seeking- rather than centring the system.
-
While we still met the system's needs (service eligibility, assessment criteria, case notes, risk assessment, safety planning, collecting data, our expertise about what we wanted them to focus on, etc) we aimed to de-centre or "quiet" these so they sat in the background.
-
We aimed for a roughly 80:20 split in the family coach’s time, with no more than 20% of their time spent servicing the system.
Work with Hope
We didn't start with a focus on deficit and need, or even goals at the outset.
-
Families created a vision of their good life, which had an emotional connection for them.
-
We explored their strengths, positives already in place.
-
We started from the things that they had motivation to act on, used creative approaches to support these and used small wins to build motivational capital to attempt bigger actions.
Connect with Resources
Decrease Mental Load
We know that the helping system can unintentionally place additional emotional load on families who are already under immense pressure.
-
We met at times and in safe locations that fitted with the families' availability and comfort.
-
We fitted around school hours, other appointments, work rosters, transport limitations and anxiety about leaving the house.
Grow the Good Life
We worked with the concept of the good life as a garden. The good life is not a point of arrival. It is always changing.
-
Seeds can be planted and can grow even in the midst of hardship.
-
The role for helping organisations is to create enabling conditions for families and communities to grow their good life on their terms.
We brought practical resources to the table:
-
Physical hands-on help by staff, access to handyman, cleaner, skip bin where needed.
-
Emergency Relief to stabilise financial situation.
-
Brokerage to invest in families' growth
-
Brains trust on call for coach to research opportunities and provide advice.
-
Warm referrals to specialist supports used sparingly, only where the coach could not meet general needs.
-
Introductions to mentors with common interests, social community activities and groups.
-
Small cash incentives at key milestones.
Hilary Cottam- Radical Help
The Sunshine Project draws from the design work pioneered over the past decade by social designer, Hilary Cottam, and her UK consultancy Participle, which is featured in her book Radical Help and her website.
Radical Help highlights the ways in which the current welfare system, developed in the post WWII era, is no longer fit for purpose for our times, and describes a new way of thinking about and delivering social welfare in the 21st century that can take care of everyone- young and the old, those who are unwell and those who seek good work
At the heart of this new way of working is human connection. When people feel supported by strong human relationships change happens. And when we design new systems that make this sort of collaboration feel simple and easy people want to join in. Cottam's design projects show the wastage in current ineffective systems and calculate the value returned to civil society in taking a different, more radical apprach.
100 Families WA
The 100 Families WA project contributed to the evidence base on poverty, entrenched disadvantage and social exclusion in WA to inform policy and practice. The project elevated the voice of families experiencing hardship and highlighted the ways in which services and systems can make it hard for people seeking help to get it.
The Sunshine Project was developed as a response to the findings of the 100 Families Project, a sector-wide research project in Western Australia, which interviewed and surveyed over 100 families regularly over a 2 year period, to understand their experiences of hardship and of the help-seeking system.
​
Following the release of the findings, Ruah and Anglicare WA, two of the 100 Families project partners sought to explore what it might look like in practice to radically alter the way we think about and provide supports, which they are doing through the Sunshine Project.
100 Families WA was a collaborative research project between Anglicare WA, Jacaranda Community Centre, the Centre for Social Impact University of Western Australia (CSI UWA), the UWA Social Policy, Practice and Research Consortium, the UWA School of Population and Global Health, Wanslea Family Services, Centrecare, Ruah Community Services, UnitingCare West, Mercycare, and the WA Council of Social Services.
To learn more about the project, go to the 100 Families WA website.
.png)