top of page

Insights and Learning

This project was intended first and foremost as a learning project. 
Insights have been captured and shared through a range of mediums.

IMG_5546.JPG

Interim Insights

Following the co-design work undertaken with families during the first 6 months of the project to map their experiences (including their experiences of the COVID pandemic), their access to resources such as food/capital, their relationships (who helps me/who I help) and their visions of the Good Life, we had an immense amount of rich data to share.  

In October 2022, we hosted a Gallery Walk to highlight some of the initial insights about the specific experiences of families facing significant hardship in Kwinana/Rockingham. Participating families helped curate the event, selecting objects to be displayed which symbolised their struggle and their dreams. 

Download the Insights Report here. 
Download the systems map here

The Good Life

One of the biggest themes to come from the project has been the framing of the Good Life.
The discussions around what is the Good Life, with participating families, with our organisational service teams, our Board members have consistently centred around four key themes:
 

  1. Ability to Meet Basic Needs

  2. Access to healing

  3. Connection 

  4. ​​A sense of purpose and a contribution

​​

​Starting with the Good Life as the focal point has been well received by everyone who has encountered it. It has provided a hopeful vision anchored in the deepest parts of each person.

The framing of the good life as a garden rather than an arrival point allows space for elements of the good life to be present even in the midst of hardship. Its expression can be unique to each family- I may want a garden with strawberries and you may want tomatoes.
It doesn't aim for completion. It aims for health over time, which adapts to changing circumstances. All of the other aspects of The Sunshine Project connect back to this premise of The Good Life. 

Outcomes for Families

While outcomes were unique for each of the 6 families and their 27 family members, we were able to capture shifts in their situations across a number of different domains.  We did not pre-determine outcomes at the outset as we did not want to constrain the possibilities of the project. our only criteria was that families would be better off by their own definition. Families were involved in determining what outcomes we should collect ("What will be different and how will we know if it's working") and participated in a range of qualitative and quantitative data collection exercises throughout the project. 

Things we were able to help families shift

Stabilized

  • Relieve mental and emotional load

 

Avoided/Reduced

  • Risk Factors for unemployment, homelessness, child protection intervention.

 

Improved

  • Protective factors around mental health and wellbeing.

  • Self-concept- Hope, feeling in control.

 

Growth across several of the domains of the Good Life:

  • Able to meet their basic needs- out of a crisis.

  • Improve relationships and make new connections outside home.

  • Able to heal and access specialist supports.

  • Using their gifts and talents- the things that bring them joy.

 

Things we weren't able to help families shift

External circumstances

  • Housing supply, cost of living, broader system mechanisms, societal prejudice

​​

Demands of the helping system

  • Lack of trauma informed staff/policy/process

  • Bureaucratic bungles, duplication, waitlists etc.

 

Personal factors

  • Chronic mental health or disability

  • Deeply entrenched internalised mindsets and generational narratives

​

The team also captured satisfaction ratings throughout the project to ensure that the way we were working was respectful. Satisfaction rating responses sat above 80-90% across the board for the duration of the project. 

System Insights

Given the number of participating individuals is not statistically significant, the above data was more useful in inform learning rather than attempting to empirically prove our methods. 

The efficacy of coaching approaches which are highly relational and flexible to the family's unique context is already well demonstrated, particularly for families with complex needs. Our key interest was in what enabling conditions need to be present for this kind of work to happen consistently and well.

Throughout all of the prototypes, we captured learning about the system immune response. 
We had initially thought of the system as what happens out there, but we were reminded of the ways that we are ourselves part of the system. 

  • our own internalised narratives about how things should happen and why. ​

  • ​our own organisational practices, and those of other social sector organisations, which constrain

  • the ability to be genuinely family-led, trauma informed and holistic.

  • the parallel ways in which this is repeated at Government level, in commissioning and social policy.

​​

The System Immune Response

 

Independent Evaluation

Anglicare WA and Ruah engaged Innovation Unit to conduct an independent evaluation of The Sunshine Project.

Their team reviewed all of the project's documentation and conducted interviews with participating families, as well as community orgs who partnered with us on the community prototypes to understand how the project's approach differs from the BAU of service delivery, and what this has enabled for participating families.

They undertook a cost benefit assessment to estimate of the Return on Investment of the Sunshine Project to the system in dollar terms. 

Download the Evaluation Report 

“It could be that the neighbourhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change.
If you’re trying to improve lives, maybe you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighbourhood, in a systematic way, at a steady pace.”

David Brooks

bottom of page