Design Lab — Co-production with care-experienced young people during lockdown (Part 2)
In Post 01 I shared what we learned from doing co-production in the Design Lab with care-experienced young people to reduce loneliness and social isolation. This post is about how we co-produced and delivered services remotely during lockdown and 7 peer-to-peer service design principles we’ll be taking forward into future work.
Plymouth Care Journeys Design Lab in Lockdown Video
Some context on the Wild Plym and Social Spatula meet-ups
Through the Design Lab, a team of care-experienced young people designed and delivered test ideas to reduce loneliness and social isolation. The two ideas we tested during lockdown were; Wild Plym, a weekly meet up for care-experienced young people who are nature lovers, adventurers or just like being outside and The Social Spatula Project, a weekly cooking club run by care-experienced young people for their peers. If you want to know more have a read of our first post in this series.
When care-experienced young people take the lead
On the 17th of March 2020, when the UK had just tipped into lockdown, Wild Plym had 5 hours to adapt their afternoon meet-up for a newly remote world.
Instead of giving up, the care-experienced team created a new plan. They would host the first remote Wild Plym meet-up on Discord — a free streaming platform often used by gamers to chat whilst they play. Two young people in the lab are gamers so they became ‘tech support’ and very patiently helped everyone install and find their way around Discord.
When we logged in that afternoon 4 young people were waiting for us online. This number may sound small, but this was a massive success given we’d changed plans hours earlier.
The meet-up started off with a game of Facebook DrawSomething to create some connection between us and then everyone settled in for a watch party of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II on Discord.
But what about the risks of meeting with young people online?
Here are some top tips from our experience of running online meet-ups and groups with young people.
- Be realistic about risks: No matter whether we meet face to face or online with young people there is always an element of risk. Instead of shutting down the option for delivering online services out of our own fear of something going wrong, plan out ways to reduce that risk and think through what you might do if something goes wrong. For example, we had a situation where a young person began over-sharing on an online group late at night, upsetting some of the other young people in the group. In response to this we arranged a 1–2–1 call with that young person the next day to understand why she behaved that way and what she could do differently next time to get support. We also debriefed with the other young people in the group.
- Separate personal and professional: use a work laptop or phone for all your direct work with young people online. If you don’t have one and are starting to do direct work with young people online ask your employer about this as it is a breach of GDPR to store young people’s personal data on your personal phone without their permission.
- Be clear about who you are: Create a separate professional profile that clearly shows who you are. For example, Irit Care Journeys. This allows young people to know straight away
- Consider ring-fencing groups: ‘friends only’ means that only certain members can join the group. This is good for security and ensuring the safety of the group
- Make it okay to mute: One of the benefits of peer-to-peer online groups is that young people can chat when they want to, however it’s important to make sure that everyone knows they don’t need to respond to anyone straight away and that they can mute the group when they want peace and quiet.
Both Wild Plym and Social Spatula had already set up Facebook messenger groups for their meetups before lockdown. We often get asked what the right platform is to communicate with young people online? If your organisation doesn’t have clear guidance, start with asking what you want to use the platform for? And then ideally discuss options with young people.
Experimenting with the format of online meet-ups
A few weeks into lockdown, when the sun was shining and everyone was getting cabin fever, we started introducing Wild Plym remote walks. We’d give the walks a simple goal like finding a lovely view-point near your house, or going dog-spotting in a local park. The walks provided an excuse for young people to get out of the house and feel connected with friends. We discovered that remote walks, just like face to face walks, are a really good way to encourage conversation and relieve social anxiety.
We tried to be flexible around how young people joined and engaged with the meet ups each week, for example, if we were going on a walk and one young person wanted to stay at home that was absolutely fine. We didn’t mind if someone couldn’t make it one week or whether young people turned their cameras on or off. These simple acts of flexibility show young people they have control over the way they engage with a service.
A month later we tried running remote workshops, designed and facilitated by a young person in the Wild Plym team who’s about to start a carpentry course at college. We foraged for wooden twigs to make frames for pressed flowers and made hanging plant holders out of recycled plastic bottles. The young person made sure the workshop ideas catered to every skill level and that materials could be found around the house or adapted easily. For me, this young person’s empathy and pragmatism was a really powerful reminder of the value people with lived experience bring to service delivery.
Overall we ran 24 hours of Wild Plym, with 4 participants, 5 remote walks, 2 tutorials and over 150 photos of nature shared.
For more information about how we ran Wild Plym remotely to reduce loneliness and social isolation check out our Catalyst Service Recipe.
The Social Spatula Project during lockdown
The Social Spatula Project took a different shape to Wild Plym during lockdown. We noticed early on that there was a lot of engagement in the Social Spatula Facebook messenger group, with over 100 messages in the first week. However, unlike Wild Plym the Social Spatula Project struggled to get regular engagement for weekly afternoon video meet-ups. Group members later told us this was because of social anxiety or because the time didn’t suit them.
So, we started running a light hearted weekly food quiz and created weekly Social Spatula cooking challenges that young people could do when they felt like it. The cooking challenges were dreamed up by the care-experienced Social Spatula team, who, similarly to the Wild Plym team made sure the challenges were inclusive of different cooking abilities and access to ingredients. One week young people had to cook something with a pepper, another week there was an orange coloured ingredient challenge an eggs challenge, etc.
In a reflection interview with one Social Spatula participant we learned that the meet-up had inspired her to cook something new. The peer-to-peer element is both a way to build confidence and skills.
In our final week we encouraged young people to reduce loneliness and social isolation for other people in their neighbourhoods through a ‘Cakes and Kindness’ challenge. Carin in the Care Journeys team delivered cake mixes to young people’s doorsteps which young people baked and delivered cakes to neighbours. With challenges like this we’re trying to enact a wonderful strength-based Camerado’s principle — if someone is struggling, try asking them to help you.
Overall we ran 15 social spatula quizzes with 8 regular participants who uploaded more than 260 snaps of their food across 3 months.
For more information about how we ran The Social Spatula Project remotely to reduce loneliness and social isolation check out our Catalyst Service Recipe.
7 principles to sustaining meaningful peer-to-peer services with care-experienced young people
But first, a note on what we mean by a ‘peer to peer service’
In this work a ‘peer-to-peer service’ refers to care-experienced young people running meet-ups — like Wild Plym or Social Spatula — for each-other. This is different to a care-experienced professional supporting a care-experienced young person.
The audio recordings below are excerpts from reflection chats with the care-experienced lab team and young people who participated in Wild Plym or Social Spatula. They have kindly given us permission to share their reflections in Care Journeys research.
01. Bring us together through common interests or a shared purpose, such as nature, cooking or social justice — so we all have a focus we care about.
Like it’s…the motivation comes from doing something that you like…like Social Spatula, if someone likes cooking or they like food, it’s the motivation to get them out but with Wild Plym if someone likes nature and they like walking it’s the motivation to get them out.
02. Give us choices so we know we are respected and empowered when we engage on our own terms.
It’s better because in person I am a lot more anxious and I’m a lot more paranoid and more quiet…but over like video calls and virtual calls it’s actually alright because I am not there but it’s like I am so don’t have to be so nervous.
03. Create safe spaces by bringing small groups of care-experienced young people who are supported by a consistent team of practitioners.
That’s like a big thing for me. If I feel safe in the environment I will open up, if i don’t I will completely shut off, I’ll try to…I’ll avoid it, like if I can’t physically avoid it I’ll kind of like emotionally avoid it.
I mean I feel like people definitely felt comfortable with us because it was run by cared-for people. I feel like everyone knew that everyone was in the same boat. There was definitely that understanding that people could post if they weren’t feeling ok or they were down.` I feel like that’s a thing. People find it easier to communicate if the people they’re communicating with have that basic understanding.
04. Build communities we can dream with, try things out with, learn with and who believe in what we’re really capable of.
Yeah. Because normally I’d be like, ‘Oh well that doesn’t work. We’ll just leave that there and leave it half done,’ and try something else. But I think as lab’s gone on, we’ve learned that you can do stuff even if it does seem virtually and mentally impossible. And even if you don’t succeed at first, if you just try again. You can get somewhere in life.
05. Play is medicine. It helps us connect, relax and improves our mental wellbeing.
It’s improved my mental health. It’s made me a lot brighter. It’s made me a happier person in the past couple of weeks because it’s an escape from reality, it’s an escape from my mental health. So it is a good thing. So it’s a benefit health wise.
Everyone’s just funny on there, everyone makes me laugh yeah.
You can have a laugh, you can talk to people, stops you getting lonely.
06. Show us our voices matter by listening to our ideas and building on them with us to make them happen.
We never lost our voice we just had extra bits added to it to make it what it is and that always helps when a young person thinks yeah, they’ve got the idea, but they’re just gonna tweak it a little bit just so its even better instead of just going no your idea is crap, this is what I think and taking over, it wasn’t ever like that.
07. Leave us with friendships we can rely on and a way to stay connected with the service for future opportunities.
I know now in the future that I don’t have to put on a face to get good friends coz good friends will accept you for you.
Well I’m glad the bigger Care Journeys group exists, so we can still all kind of communicate on that because I do feel like if there wasn’t anything it would be really really difficult.
In the next post
What does this all mean for children’s services workers? What was different about this way of working for the Plymouth Care Journeys team? And how we are taking the work forward to create systemic change through our partnership with Plymouth City Council?
With thanks to Nadia Irakoze-Thums, Carin Laird, Jemma Flower and Nick Cook from the Plymouth Care Journeys team. Thank too to Sohila Sawhney from the #FutureBarnardos team for supporting the work throughout.
Irit is a Social Designer in the #FutureBarnardos team working across the Plymouth Care Journeys programme.
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