Shift in December: The best shifts are the ones we make together

Michael Roberts
Shift Design
Published in
5 min readDec 12, 2023

Hello again! It’s fast approaching 2024 and, to end the year, we wanted to talk about making real change.

Last month, we talked about how we can strengthen the roots for community-led change by showcasing the impact of existing efforts, fighting for more space within existing structures and experimenting with equitable ways of making social investment decisions.

To end 2023, we’re talking about what we do best at Shift — creating things that you can visibly see improve people’s lives. We share some of the shift’s we’ve been part of this year and the principles that guide us in making real change. Plus, find out how we can help you create the change you want to see with the launch of our new training offer in January!

Launching our new training offer

Looking to invest in your own design or innovation team? Does your in-house innovation team need a boost to create genuine impact? We’ve been helping our partners with the ‘how to’ of social innovation and design for the last 15 years. From running bespoke training programmes for design teams in big charities to mentoring micro-charities and social entrepreneurs, we can flex our offer based on your own needs and work with you to tailor support that suits. We’ll be soft launching our training offer in January which can help your team to:

  • Do genuine community research to pinpoint opportunities for innovation
  • Co-design new ideas for impact
  • Prototype new ideas in the real-world to learn what has legs
  • Share decision-making power with the people and communities you exist to serve

Keep your eyes peeled for our mixed-cohort schedule or get in touch to book us in with your whole team!

The best shifts are the ones we make together

This year we’ve been lucky enough to play a part in making things real with our partners and people closest to issues spanning mental health and employment.

Co-designing a mental health response for stroke survivors

We worked with stroke survivors and those working with stroke survivors to come up with, test and refine ideas for improving mental health after stroke in Wales. The Stroke Association and Mind Cymru will be looking to pilot a series of new services next year.

Getting older workers into good work after redundancy

Working together with people who have experienced redundancy over the age of 50 and the Centre for Ageing Better, we created a new scheme to support people back into meaningful work.

Supporting young women make the change they want with work

Building on our co-design ideas workshops earlier in the year, we worked with young women co-designers and Young Women’s Trust to prototype a peer and professional network for young women to support their vision of an equal world of work.

Building a social investment panel of young Londoners

We’re supporting young Londoners with experience of unemployment to make investment decisions. The Vested panel will choose how to invest up to £300k in organisations they believe can make an impact against youth unemployment.

How people lead change

Earlier this year, we launched our new strategy for people-led social change. At the heart of our approach to systems change is the belief that people are the experts in their own lives and that meaningful change can only happen when people are empowered to take the lead.

Changing Futures Northumbria are showing how much more impactful people-led approaches can be as they rethink public services using The Liberated Method. We read the story of Brian*. A man who, over 9 years, had 3,300+ interactions with different local services at a cost of £2 million. Yet no visible improvement to his life. They flipped to a relational approach, with caseworkers starting first with what mattered to Brian. After 12 months, 161 interactions, some money for clothes, food, treatment and accommodation, he’s in control, in recovery, building a life with a community and he is happier.

It’s stories like this that remind us we must make sure that we’re investing what money and resources there are available in creating things that visibly improve lives, not in sustaining the things that don’t.

Over the last years, we’ve been refining how we do this work with partners. It’s not easy. How we get there is by grounding the work we do in these three principles.

Make things together.

We start by assembling an alliance around an issue, one with the people impacted in the lead.

Make things real.

We take ideas off paper, test them and adapt fast to see if they improve lives. We believe real change happens when you can demonstrate what is possible.

Make things strong.

When we know something has the potential to improve lives, we make sure the income and infrastructure is in place to help them thrive.

Find out what else we’ve been up to lately

We are partnering with the Unlock Coalition — the world’s largest youth-focused organisations — to explore how a Funders Collective could unlock funding for youth initiatives. Oli and Duncan were in Paris at Scouts HQ to run an intergenerational co-design session for the collective.

We’ve built a learning consortium for trusts and foundations to share knowledge and insights into participatory funding and power sharing, as part of Vested.

Duncan was presenting at the Gathering and the Equality Impact Investing Taskforce — sharing our project learnings about equitable and participatory investment across the UK’s social investment space.

Oli was at Connects, speaking with Immy Kaur and Rachel Rowney on ‘powerful endings’ and how we can support people and projects to end, compost or transition well.

Want to talk about partnering up?

If you’re a charity or organisation wanting to deepen the impact of an existing service, reach a new group you’re struggling to reach or develop something totally new in meaningful partnership with the people you exist to serve, we’d love to talk. Set up a chat with us — hello@shiftdesign.org 💛

We’re looking for someone to help us with our next Shift

We’re looking for someone with a track record of income generation and an established network of social impact funders to come and help us shape our next generation of long term projects. If you’re looking for an exciting challenge in the New Year, find out more and apply here.

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