Participle

11:30am - Ryan answers the Southwark Circle phone and greets Alan. Alan is looking for some help with learning how to email. Within minutes, Ryan has called Caroline, a neighbourhood helper, and arranged a visit for the following day. Alan got on well with Caroline the last time she visited to have a look at why his printer wasn’t working. 

12:00pm - Another member named Edith answers the door to Denise, a neighbourhood helper in her area. Denise has come round to help Edith sort out a cupboard and to take some of the things she no longer wants to the charity shop. Edith pays £30 a quarter for her membership to Southwark Circle and has used it to gets a number of DIY tasks done around the house. When her washing machine stopped working, another neighbourhood helper named Sarah took a look at it. According to Edith:  “It turned out to be the filter, Sarah emptied it and it worked again. That saved me £40 in call out charges just to check it.”

1:45pm - Louis greets a neighbourhood helper, Luciana with ‘Hola!’ He has been learning Spanish from Luciana for a couple of weeks now. He read about another member in the Southwark Circle newsletter who learns Spanish and was inspired. Last week, Louis met up with another member, Derek, who like him is from the West Indies and a cricket fan. They watched the West Indies vs. England test match and, whilst they hit it off, the West Indies were less successful!

Every one of our members personalises the service to match their own life. For some, it’s just about getting help with something specific like computer lessons or learning a musical instrument. For others, it is about getting help with bits and pieces around the home, and many members use it meet new people and do things for other members.

If you’re looking for help yourself, or perhaps looking for help for your parents, Southwark Circle is now up and running. Call to find someone to help out with gardening, a spot of DIY or to share a coffee with!

If you are interested in joining Southwark Circle give us a call on
0800 112 3441 or email for more information.

In Camp Croydon Karim and his friend spot an advertisment on the bus, the free refreshments encourage them to go along. Meanwhile recluse Leo spots his advert on facebook. Eventually the two end up at Camp Croydon (not in Croydon). The camp turns out to be one big sampling experience, Leo and Karim meet different people, live in different cultures and get away from the city a chance to breath and think about new things.

The economy is never static, so why is our approach to unemployment? Take Bernard: he cooks a mean fishcake and has great entrepreneurial skills but he cannot read and write and is low in confidence.  To enter the labour market he needs an approach that helps him translate his skills.  This takes time, and works better over a cup of tea in his kitchen, than in a job centre office.  Working in a domestic setting we have been able to view the challenge Bernard and others like him face and translate this into employable skills, with considerable early success.

This month the number of people unemployed made a worse than expected jump, to a new total of 2.38 million, with job vacancies reaching an all time low of 429,000.  In response the DWP are scrambling to expand their network of job centres and the numbers who are employed within them – but to offer what exactly?  Perhaps tea and sympathy sweetened with the £60.50 per week job seekers allowance.

The problem we face is huge and expensive.  In addition to those currently losing their jobs, there remains the so-called ‘stock’ of long term unemployed, people like Bernard.  There are also a significant proportion of British workers, for whom the cycle will be a continual one between low skilled, vulnerable jobs and periods of unemployment.

The human cost in terms of misery is high.  So are the financial costs.  David Freud, previously advisor to the government and to the opposition, recently estimated that it would be rational to spend up to £62,000 per person on getting people back to work because the cost of unemployment is so high.

It is time for a radical re-think.  We need a system that makes new vertical connections between British people and emerging areas of employment growth – for example green jobs, the caring professions, nano-tech, social enterprise.  And new horizontal connections between soft skills, apprenticeships, learning and work.

In other words we need an approach that brings together soft and hard skills, geography and industrial policy; that integrates and greatly reduces the £40bn cost of unemployment; that starts from people’s front rooms and has the capacity for continued evolution.

Searching for work is a dispiriting process.  Despite a physical re-design, job centres remain more suited to the bygone era in which the welfare state was founded. Searching for a job online, as I did last week, is no different.  The electronic journey is long-winded and grey.  I was a nameless cog, identified only by my postcode, viewing jobs which rarely had a real description or salary attached.  The chasm between this and the compelling description of a job in the Times, or alternatively the way I might advertise my full range of skills on gumtree.com could not be wider.

At Participle we work with young people, so called ‘chaotic’ families and those over 60 in communities across Britain developing 21st century public services.  It has taught us a lot about work and how to move into it. 

In the eyes of the local job centre many of the families we work with have few if any of the skills that are needed to work in a modern service economy even in an upswing. In all cases however we have seen the power of meeting individuals and families where they are, visualising (literally) where they want to be, and working alongside them to get there.  Some of the best providers of welfare to work services already go some way to this approach but all are currently hampered by the silos in which their service has to be delivered.

In another strand of our work we have developed the concept of the ‘slip road job’: one that supports older people back into work either part time or in a different capacity.  The BMW worker made redundant earlier this year is a different case.  Here connections can be made between proven skills and job opportunities but new support systems are also needed to turn a potential crisis into a re-skilling opportunity, to keep motivated and think laterally about what is possible.

There are four fatal flaws in the current system and these will continue in the new contracts currently being handed out across Britain to those responsible for getting people back into work. 

One, the system is over specialised – like vast areas of our public services too much time and money is spent on sorting people into ‘pathways’ and ‘customer’ types.  Such an approach wastes more money on designing new entry points to what remains an old fashioned linear system.  What is needed instead is an open network that can support people in multiple ways and continue to move them up the skills curve.  Most of us find jobs through connections and you can’t do this if you are held in a queue with others whose barriers are too close to your own.

Secondly, service providers are currently competing for the £1bn market of welfare to work.  The real market however is approximately £40 bn when Further Education and so called ‘passported’ benefits to which the unemployed have access, are taken into account.  There is a clear opportunity to develop a service that starts with the individual and wraps a full service around them, stripping out a significant percentage of the £40bn resulting from service overlaps.

Thirdly, there needs to be a new approach to risk sharing.  It is accepted that most work is found locally but there is currently little incentive to innovate locally since the returns and risks are held by central government.  Again the result is a static, rigid system when what we need is a approach that addresses the constantly shifting needs of individuals based on a living, breathing, changing economy.

Fourthly – it’s personal.  Being unemployed is a deeply personal thing – whether you are the skilled but newly unemployed worker from BMW or the returning to work mum lacking in confidence – you need someone to work along side you.

Despite the rhetoric providers do not currently work with people they do things for and to them, too often perpetuating a workless culture.  Treat people like children and they will behave like them.  Current service frameworks do not make it possible to take a whole life approach with an individual.  Technology does, front line staff can and yes, the unemployed really want this type of approach.

A reformed, modern welfare state would offer something completely different.  The core would be a universal, locally rooted and highly personalised offer.  Not a job centre at all, but a network of facilitators, linked to a powerful system of job vacancies, training opportunities, seed enterprise funding linked to the benefit system, mentors and coaches to keep your pecker up, peers you can speak to during the weeks ahead.  Replicating the support networks that most people reading would automatically draw on, would cost less and more importantly, would work.

Loops is a youth and community development platform. It grows young people and community’s possibility and purpose through shared and surprising experiences. It’s about young people and communities wanting and getting more from each other.

Read our latest brochure to learn about how Loops works. If you participated in the prototype, and want to see the video, click here. (requires password)

For six-weeks, we tested Loops at a small-scale with with 25 young people, ages 12-19, in Brighton and Croydon. We use prototypes to help us learn about what works and what doesn’t in real-time, and to continuously iterate our propositions, training and tools, materials, front and back-end systems, and metrics.

We made 90 experiences happen in the community and young people met with reflectors for over 60 reflective sessions. 

We learned that…
It is possible to mobilize the community and generate new resource.
High receptivity. In less than six-weeks, catalysts made 150 community contacts. We were more successful than we had anticipated. Small businesses and local organizations ‘got it’ immediately; many had never been asked to engage with the community in this way.  It came in more shapes and sizes than work experience; and because the young person chose the experience, there was a real basis for exchange. 
Great diversity. We had experiences spawning 20 different interest areas: from building speakers at a high-end factory to meeting with the partner of a top law firm to collaborating with international artists on an exhibition to stuffing owls at a taxidermy museum. 

Young people, parents, parents, and hosts derive clear benefits from Loops.
Changed attitudes, values and behaviors.  Young people who were actively engaged in Loops found they were more confident in new settings, more independent, could ask better questions, had made at least one ‘link’ to the community, and were more willing to try new things. Parents talked about seeing their young person be more reflective, do more on their own, interact with adults more confidently, take more positive risks, and find future opportunity.
Changed perceptions. Hosts of experiences were surprised to find that young people could be truly useful. Many began to see young people as collaborators, and were inspired to engage with young people more regularly.
Changed practice. The youth professionals and youth services we closely engaged with saw that an asset-based, developmental approach could be integrated into all the things they do.

blogpost by Tanya Palmer, August 2009

3:44pm: “That was well good!” says Regan stepping out of the show room door at Bowers and Wilkins (B&W Speakers), the giants in sound speaker manufacturing. “You can tell their stuff is good… but you have to hear their speakers to really know how great they are. That was amazing!” he trills beaming from ear to ear. 

This was Regan’s immediate response to spending 3 and a ½ fantastic hours building a state-of-the-art sound speaker with the craftsmen and -women on the B&W speaker factory floor, listening to acoustic guitar in the music room and watching a speeding Daniel Craig (aka James Bond) wrecking a shiny black Aston Martin in the cinema.

11:30am: When Regan had arrived at East Worthing station full of anticipation about his new experience with B&W Speakers, he would never have guessed he’d be following in the footsteps of Madonna and Fat Boy Slim! Like these film and music greats Regan had caught the B&W Speakers bug, he wanted to own a speaker too.

12 pm: Graham, the HR Manager, greeted Regan in reception and proudly directed him towards a surreal-looking sound speaker, which could be described as a something like a cross between the star trek enterprise and a snail on steroids. The Nautilus, as it is named, sat beneath a framed company award for enterprise given by HM the Queen. It looked sleek, glossy, cool… and extremely powerful too.
[Photo of Regan and the snail]

12:20pm: Moving onto the factory floor, Regan began to share his top four questions with Graham. “Where do you get your ideas for your speakers? How did you get into making speakers? How do you make money for your business?” “Can I make a speaker please?” The host responded carefully to each of his requests including a fifth which was to ‘have fun’ on his experience with the B&W Speakers team.

12: 35pm: Armed with questions and snaking their way across the brightly-lit building, it soon became clear this was no ordinary factory, and as such would be no ordinary experience for Regan. Like the men and women in their blue jumpsuits, Regan would soon find himself helping to craft a beautiful work of ‘sound speaker’ art.

1:15pm: As Regan watched drills dangling on cables fall from the sky and computer screens flicker the letters P.A.S.S. as diamond-encrusted speaker discs rolled on by, his excitement intensified. And responding to this, Graham handed him over to Jenny, the trainer!

1:50pm: Regan donned a dark-blue B&W branded apron and got stuck into fixing a speaker disc into a wooden sound box while Jenny worked with him and watched on, gently giving him instructions and encouragement. Some 30 minutes later, with a screwdriver in hand, Regan watched proudly as the computer declared his speaker a P.A.S.S. Smiling into the camera with Jenny and his musical creation sitting by his side, he announced that he would do that experience all over again. Even then, Regan had no clue that the best was yet to come!

2:20pm: “Here you go,” said Graham handing over a goodie bag with CDs, a T-shirt, mug, brochures and so on… “I’ll walk you over to the showroom for the next bit of the tour.” En route Graham explained how female factory workers during World War I had influenced modern manufacturing.

2:35pm: “Hello, I’m Steve, the training manager. I’m going to show you some of our speakers and you can hear the quality of sound for yourself”. Leading us into a darkened-room filled with a range of top-class equipment from the ‘Zeppelin’, a large ruby ball-shaped iPod speaker through to a chrome funnel-like stereo, (something well-suited to a premier league footballer’s car), Steve explained the inspiration behind their unique futuristic designs.

2:55pm: Seated in the centre of a cream sofa, the exact sweet spot in the music room, Steve flicked on a CD. “Tell me what you think” he smiled as he adjusted the volume.  And as the guitarist plucked the strings, it seemed as if he/she were in the room with us. “Wow!” Regan commented, “It was like they were right behind the curtains!”

3:15pm: Now it was movie time! Watching Bruce Willis flying through a tunnel limbs flaying, his body narrowly missing a car, the sound of the explosion filled the room leaving us struck dumb.

3:30pm: “This cinema system costs about 250,000 pounds. We sell a lot to owners of super yachts (though you can get fantastic sound for around 6,000 pounds).” As James Bond fled the baddies in his glossy black sports car, bullets ricocheting from every part of the bodywork, I couldn’t help but think I had been spoiled. There was no looking back now.  I wanted a Bowers & Wilkins cinema sound system too.

3:45: Leaving the showroom, Regan turned to me and added, “I am really excited. I want to build a system for my scooter.” And so enthused was he that he decided there and then to send the Bowers and Wilkins team a thank you letter. Afterall “they didn’t have to give me their time… That was well good!”

Regan’s experience had clearly left him inspired and full of ideas for how he could use his experience in the future. He wanted more!

Learn more about Loops or see an overview of the 100s of experiences http://www.loops.tv
The website of B&W Speakers, who hosted the experience: http://www.bowers-wilkins.co.uk/

It all began back in January with a few principles and a process.

Our principles were pretty basic:  focus on young people’s assets and capabilities, not on their deficits or failings; and look at young people as products of and contributors to their communities.

Our process was equally simple: start with young people, understand their perspectives and motivations, and develop new models for youth services with them from there.

Now, seven-months after we started, we’re on-the-ground testing a new model for universal youth services. It’s less of a service, and more of a wholesale approach for community & youth development.  For now, we’re calling it Loops.

Loops is designed to expand young people’s sense of purpose and possibility.  It’s based on one key premise: young people need compelling reasons to invest in themselves, their communities and their futures. Existing youth services are based on a different premise: young people need places to go and things to do to stay out of trouble.  The main difference? Loops is developmental , not diversionary.

Loops works by connecting young people to surprising experiences in the community.  Young people work with a reflector—a person who enables young people to identify & build on their strengths & interests—to locate experiences in the community that expose them to new ways of living and doing. Experiences might last anywhere from an hour to several weeks; they might be a behind the scenes tour of a local restaurant and conversation with a chef to a week taking on a role or completing a project for a business or community group.  People called catalysts are up-skilled to work with big and small businesses, community and faith groups to extract great experiences. Young people can take on both the role of reflector and catalyst.

This summer, Loops is running at a very small scale. We’ve got 10 young people in Croydon and 10 young people in Brighton, ages 12-18, taking part. We’ve up-skilled 6 youth workers, teachers and life coaches as reflectors and 3 other people as catalysts. Our catalysts have made over 80 experiences happen this summer, with leads for another 60+.  You can visit http://www.loops.tv to get a flavor for the kinds of experiences on offer.

We’re running Loops at a small scale to learn and iterate. We know to make Loops happen at a much larger (universal) scale, we need to make it less of a service and more of a self-perpetuating entity owned and operated by young people and the community.

Loops is helping us, in real-time, learn what a capability versus needs based approach looks like. And to think differently about the resources that drive public services.  For Loops to work at scale, we need experiences to come from the community. Rather than invest in buildings and static services, ‘the state’ could more effectively invest in building the capacity of every sector of society to work with youth in different ways.  It’s not a youth center in every constituency anymore. Its young people meaningfully embedded throughout our communities. 

We’re well on the way to start trying out our loops of experiences this summer! And we’re calling it LOOPS. We’re also rapidly growing the LOOPS team of four to about 20 people for a while. Young people are joining our team as catalysts and experience agents. Catalysts will work with local organisations and businesses to create new experiences for young people, whereas agents will evaluate the quality of the experiences and give us feedback.

LOOPS will be up and running at small scale in July and August with about 20 young people and 5 families, in Brighton and Croydon. In this way we hope to learn how to make it work for real. And how to make it better!

Last weeks we did a lesson in year 7, 9 and 10 in a school in Brighton to get feedback on our ideas and the way of presenting them. We’ve made this quick film to give a flavour of what LOOPS is about:

Last week’s House of Lord’s judgment on duty of care widens our statutory definition of youth wellbeing. It’s about time. The ruling says it is not enough for local councils to put a roof over a homeless young person’s head, they must also provide all-around support. Safety isn’t just about attending to the most urgent of needs but also about adding to young people’s capacity to live life independently.

Participle’s work with young people in Brighton and Croydon is all about widening the definition of youth wellbeing. We’ve met lots of young people who have basic needs being met, but who are not thriving. They don’t have a real sense of purpose or possibility. They don’t feel valued. They don’t have the capabilities to find and keep meaningful employment, let alone live life on their own terms. We think the good adolescence is about all of these things--not simply having a place to live or staying out of trouble. We already invest in young people through schools and a raft of children’s’ services; that investment shouldn’t be about responding to or averting crises, but actually inputting into young people’s success. That means increasing their sense of self, their connections, and their capabilities.

Housing can be a powerful entry point to all of these things. Rather than look at housing as a way of getting young people off the streets, we should look at housing as an opportunity to build young people’s resiliency. This isn’t just an exercise in better coordination and ensuring young people have access to a full range of services. We need to look at what those services are designed to do, and the ways in which they help young people process past events and shape their sense of the future. The House of Lords was right to conclude young people are entitled to support beyond suitable housing; the real question is, what shape is that support and how can we make it an enabler rather than a gap-filler?

After an intensive 3 months of discovery and an even more intensive month of idea development Reach out is now entering the prototyping phase.  We’ve developed a vision of a ‘youth development service’ based in a fictional town called Thriving. A town where young people and adults take part in loops of doing, sampling and reflective experiences.

Doing experiences are self-designed projects where young people meet a need or goal in the family, community or workplace. A doing experience could be working with an adult to build a shed, running a campaign to reduce plastic bag usage or setting up a bike fixing business.  We think that through doing experiences young people can develop their capabilities and sense of purpose.  Doing experiences, like sampling experiences are followed by a reflective experience, to help young people reflect on what they have learnt and plan for their next loop of experience. 

Sampling experiences aim to expand young people’s sense of what’s possible by introducing them to new people, places and world views.  A narrow sense of possibility was one of the things that surprised us most from our initial research. Over the next few months, in the prototyping phase of our project we will be try out elements of Thriving with our partners in Brighton & Hove and Croydon.  So given the opportunity what would young people choose to ‘do’, who and what would they ‘sample’?

Back in February we worked with 10 young ‘design teams’ from Brighton and Croydon.  We worked with groups of friends and sibling to design experiences and services for people like them; experiences that would build their adult networks, expose them to difference and help build a strengthen their sense of self.  The three videos below give an indication of what life in Thriving could be like from a young person’s perspective. (Voices in these videos have been changed)

Communitube
Summer and her siblings imagined a community that has a ‘communitube’ website which links people of different ages through common interest. In their community there is also a network of local coaches who spot talent and link people to local cross age experiences and provide them the opportunities to try out jobs as trainees.  In Summer’s version of Thriving a film team continually documents what’s going on - the film is used later for local promotion and as a reflective tool.

Chocolate talent
‘Chocolate talent’ is a Willy Wonka a scenario built by two 14 and 15 year old friends. Two girls meet in a cornershop buying a candybar with a ticket for a behind the scenes tour to Cadburyworld. In their sampling experience the owner or the chocolate factory teaches them the science of chocolate, recongnises their capability for science and connects them to a trip to Nasa’s laboratory (located in red square Moscow).  At Nada they meet new ‘science people’ and following the trip make an online support group for teens to find their talents. They also get rich from the recipe of the new chocolate bar they invent.

Camp Croydon
In ‘Camp Croydon’ Karim and his friend spot an advertisment on the bus for volunteers - the free refreshments encourage them to go along and find out more. Meanwhile recluse Leo spots his advert on facebook. Eventually the two end up at Camp Croydon (which is not in Croydon).  The camp turns out to be one big sampling experience, Leo and Karim meet different people, live in different cultures and get away from the city a chance to breath and think about new things.

Over the next few months we’ll be prototyping doing, sampling and reflective experiences in Croydon and Brigton & Hove.  There won’t be trips to Nasa or Africa but we will be brokering young people to people and places that can expand their sense of possibility.  We can’t promise to make kids rich though their new chocolate bar but will set up doing experiences that give young people the opportunity to set up their own enterprises, and feel what it’s like to be valued.  Stay tuned.