Learning from young people

Watch this short animated film by a ex-detainee Palestianian children which, although it may not seem initially relevant to our thinking, has immense implications about how disadvantaged children express themselves and their disadvantages.

More about collaboration...

In my wilder moments, and drawing upon the unique experience of SCIE and their amazing visual learning approaches, I begin to wonder what formal teaching of medicine, education, planning, social work and associated areas is all about. The game for me is re-exploring the Nineteenth Century concept of Smilesian Self-help and I've not come across a group that does it better. Surely we all learn through apprenticeship models and what over-formal teaching does is simply remove us would-be professionals from thinking about ways in which we relate to people. Let's reinvent the world through blogging and here's COVER's (and my) first challenge. How many of our readers have thought about how we often duplicate each others' work and can any of us produce examples of consciously and reflectively working together? This doesn't mean that we take each other over but it does mean that we would all move on if we thought more about formal, and informal, cooperation.

Health resources

What about GP commissioning? COVER’s recent research shows how many VCS organisations felt that GPs did not understand the links between their work and positive health outcomes. But there are plenty of examples around how employment, benefits advice and unemployment relate to health issues. For example, check out the Bromley by Bow centre.

I don't see psychiatrists speaking openly on British videos. Take a look at a Community Health Centre’s videos in Ontario. This provides fantastic examples of people being enabled to become really involved in thinking about their own illnesses.  As one lady comments 'It's more than about doctors....'

Some American websites thinking aloud about various forms of emotional ill-health seem streets ahead of work 'over here' in terms of visual descriptions and knowledge.

Try healthy place.com for down-to-earth knowledge ranging from Alzheimer's through to depression and bi-polar disorder.

There are some good examples available from over here:

Few videos provide such a detailed account of exploitation, mistreatment and abuse of people who are ageing as on You Tube's Protecting the Dignity of our Older People.

cutmovie.co.uk is a Women's Aid video which can only shock us all as it details ways in which women are abused by men....

We should be especially proud of pioneering work in Cambridge: MakingMentalNotes is a user-led media thinking about mental and emotional health which includes more than relevant videos from Frank and Rachel Bruno and many others.

Benefit Scrounging Scum blog

Readers of this blog will have appreciated, we hope, our admiration for the BenefitScroungingScum blog which, through deliberate irony, is now delivering their visual criticisms of capacity and other benefits in 'Nothing ever happens....and the needle returns to the start of the song'.  These three powerful videos demonstrate how incredibly articulate women with severe disabilities don't need us professionals when talking about their own views of the increasingly punitive benefits system. Don't miss these videos. They tell us more about how to rethink our, too often top down, values than years of social work tuition. These people - not clients, users or patients - are looking for support and we should all join as followers.

Welcome to our blog!

We hope this blog, based on COVER e-bulletins and other work related to the COVER group (COVER, i-TRUST and Reboot), will help us think about common ground. Do we all, for instance, work closely enough together or do Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations, as well as the private, public and the social enterprise sectors fail to share, communicate and explore new ideas with each other? The task of this blog is to explore innovative ways of working together.

By way of an introduction, this first entry focuses on some of the issues raised in the latest e-bulletin (edition 156). One article in particular highlights the use of online films to get your message across. Films help us to effectively understand how people see their worlds. They can provide a contrast to the often over complex written reports by ‘experts’. They give us the information to understand how to work with people rather than for people at the local level.

For example, Community Links use online films to really bring home to us how disadvantaged people feel about their lives. Whilst not listed on the COVER ebulletin, Cambs Adult Social Care  provides a brilliant video on how personalisation, if we think about it, really works.

Whilst, not using films, Clinks works creatively to evaluate how we work with 'offenders'. It provides ten short accounts of working with, and not for, people who find themselves in difficulties with the law.

This approach won't work unless people respond and, for my money, action research, shared and innovative thinking and fully involving people should be about working with, and not for people.  I look forward to hearing from you all about how integration works and how insular thinking doesn't...