Expanding our network and building our experience

Each quarter, we take time to reflect on the progress we’re making and share it with you. Here are our reflections on the work we’ve been doing over the past three months, highlighting what we’re learning, and recognising with gratitude the contributions of everyone involved.

It’s been a time of transition for Just Ideas this summer, as we’ve wrapped up some valued, long-standing projects and embarked on some interesting new ones. Meanwhile, we’ve written tenders for even more new work, and we’re excited to share some of the projects we’ve got coming up.

We’re really proud of the flexible, creative teams we’re able to assemble at Just Ideas, and we continue to expand our diverse network of experienced, expert associates from around the UK.

Covid-19 Inquiry – Every Story Matters

We’ve now completed our active role in Every Story Matters, the listening exercise for the UK Covid-19 inquiry. Over the past two years, it has been great to work with Ipsos, in partnership with WSA Community, and with our exceptional team of Just Ideas associates.

All of us have gained valuable experience and insight through our involvement in this important project. It has felt particularly significant to hear and share people’s experiences around health inequalities in the UK, and to reach people who may not otherwise have had the opportunity to participate at a national level. To be able to engage with people with learning disabilities, people who have experienced domestic abuse, and people who are structurally isolated, for example, and to hear their experiences, is something we feel privileged to have been able to do. 

Our work covered:

Module 3 – Healthcare (engaging with, and listening to experiences of people who worked in healthcare, and people who used health services during the pandemic, particularly those with complex needs and from marginalised communities experiencing health inequalities).

Module 4 – Vaccines and Therapeutics (engaging with, and listening to experiences of, people with complex health and mental health needs, people who are rurally isolated, people experiencing structural exclusion or multiple deprivation, and young mums who had babies during the pandemic).

Module 6 – Adult Social Care Sector (engaging with, and listening to experiences of, people with care needs and in the care workforce, unpaid carers and loved ones of people needing care and support during the pandemic).

Module 7 – Test, Trace and Isolate (engaging with, and listening to experiences of, people who were digitally excluded, people supporting family members to isolate, disabled people and people with long-term illnesses, people with learning disabilities and nomadic people).

Module 8 – Children and Young People (engaging with, and listening to experiences of, people working in education with children and young people impacted by changes in education, access to health and other services, and digital communication).

Module 10 – Impact on Society (engaging with, and listening to experiences of, people who were bereaved during the pandemic, talking about the lasting impact and what can be learned, using our trauma-informed training).

You can read the Every Story Matters records published so far on the UK Covid-19 Inquiry website.

Power to Change

We’re enjoying working with Power to Change on their High Street Innovators project. Facilitating a study visit in Bristol recently, we used some of our tried-and-tested methods, like the Margolis Wheel, a technique for participatory problem-solving and idea-generation. The result was lots of sharing of learning and experience across the different organisations involved.

“A huge thank you for your skilful facilitation yesterday.”

“A productive couple of days. Thank you.”

Participants in the Bristol study visit

Helen is now working with the Power to Change team to design and plan the next study visits in Stockport and Dewsbury, supporting them to take more of a role in facilitating. In October, we start a series of training sessions for Power To Change’s wider team, on using participatory facilitation methods to make the most of gatherings, interviews and meetings.

Big Local

We ran an engaging session with Brookside Big Local, near Telford, this summer. There was a great turnout, including resident volunteers from this estate who have been involved in the Big Local project over the last ten years. The group really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate how far they’ve come.

The strength of this area is the connections between people, which the group described as almost like a Big Local family of people looking out for each other. They have managed to create a sense of community through big events on the estate, enabling neighbours to get to know each other better. Through the focal point of the Big Local project, community connections have formed that may not have been there before.

Just Ideas has been working with this group since 2019, helping them to evaluate the positive difference they’re making, so it was a great full-circle moment for us. Our associate, Thomas, created a wonderful graphic, using the road that encircles the estate as a focus.

Ipsos – Addiction Healthcare Goals

Following a successful partnership on Every Story Matters, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry Listening Exercise, Ipsos approached us to be a community engagement partner for the UK government’s Addiction Healthcare Goals programme. Once again, we’ll be working in partnership with WSA Community.

Ipsos is the lead partner in a consortium for this project, run by the Office of Life Sciences, part of the Department of Health and Social Care. The Addiction Healthcare Goals programme will look at the way addiction treatment data is used, and how to use this data in research that leads to better delivery and outcomes for people experiencing addiction.

Just Ideas’ role in the project is to make sure the perspectives and voices of the healthcare service users are properly represented, as well as the voices of people working at a grassroots, frontline level, with service users.

We’re recruiting people with lived experience of addiction treatment or rehab services for a peer advisory group, meeting for the first time in early October. They will help us develop research materials for our fieldwork in 10 locations around the UK. We’ll be working in partnership with organisations that deliver healthcare treatment or services, from small community-based services to residential rehabs linked with local authorities and the criminal justice system.

Our work will involve interviewing people and facilitating discussion groups to find out what participants think about the use of treatment data, what they understand about it, and how it could be used to contribute to better research and treatment. We’ll be talking particularly about the barriers to that data being shared and used.

We will be taking care to protect the anonymity of people contributing to the research, using our trauma-informed training to keep the interviews and group discussions safe. There will be a case study in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and each region of England. Again, Just Ideas has managed to put together a strong team of people with lived experience of addiction healthcare, both from a service user and a worker/volunteer perspective, so we’re already bringing some insight and understanding to the work.

Model Climate Conferences

We’re looking forward to getting together for another series of model climate conferences in October and November this year, in partnership with InterClimate Network. Our Just Ideas team of associates will be travelling around the country to places including Solihull, Reading, Cheltenham, Birmingham, City of London, and Babergh and Mid Suffolk, with new conferences this year in Wellington and Dudley.

Together, we’ll be helping to challenge students to explore the local, national, and global implications of climate change, role-playing climate negotiations and exploring opportunities for local climate action.

Just Ideas Collaborative

Following a great Just Ideas Collaborative gathering in the summer, we’re already planning our next gathering in the run-up to Christmas. You can find out more about the Just Ideas Collaborative here.

Keep in contact

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Work with us

We’ve built our network of associates, our capacity and our experience considerably over the past few years, and we’re now actively exploring new partnerships.

Interested in working together? Get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

We look forward to updating you on our progress again, later in the year.

Richard, Helen, Mary, Mike and the Just Ideas Collaborative.