Young people / old systems?
Systems Changers 3.0
The young people who walk through the doors of our frontline services across the country rarely arrive with just a single problem in tow. Instead, most of those who we support at The Children’s Society experience a range of interconnected issues — from poor mental health or living in care, to being sexually or criminally exploited and having difficult family lives.
Our 140-year history of working with children and young people has taught us that disadvantage is often multiple — and tackling it properly and sustainably requires action on multiple levels, in multiple ways, by multiple people or agencies in co-ordination. It requires young people and their families being at the centre, making decisions about what they want to happen, and how they want to get there.
This is often easier said than done. The multiple tends to appear messy, and understanding what’s going on in a young person’s life, who needs to be involved in supporting them, and what the shared vision or plan is for improving their outcomes can be really hard. Frame these challenges in light of a sector under considerable financial pressure, often structured around siloed delivery and commissioning frameworks, and with an expert and fiercely passionate but at times disempowered workforce, and it can feel like the task of tackling young people’s multiple disadvantage is a near-impossible one.
This is where taking a systemic approach and employing tried-and-tested design methodologies can offer us a way of making sense of, and acting on, this complexity, whilst keeping young people at the heart of our work.
Enter Systems Changers 2018–19. We’ve partnered with Lankelly Chase and The Point People to bring the fabulous Systems Changers programme to the children and young people’s sector for the first time. As Jenny Oppenheimer at Lankelly Chase and my Children’s Society colleague Peter Grigg explain in their recent blogs, this renewed programme has emerged out of a joint desire to bring systems thinking and design methodologies into the hands of frontline professionals in our sector. For us, systems change is more than just a fad, but a profoundly necessary endeavour if we want to genuinely disrupt the cycles of disadvantage experienced by some young people.
My role as Learning Lead on the programme is to support, capture and share the learning journeys of our cohort of Systems Changers, and to bring our colleagues across the sector along for the ride. We can’t change systems alone, and so are inviting our partners across the sector to join us.
Over the coming months we’ll be sharing our learning journey here on Medium, though our website, and on the Lankelly Chase blog. We’ll also be hosting a series of workshops to bring professionals together to figure out how to take systems approaches out to a wider youth sector audience — building a movement of frontline colleagues who feel confident and capable to make lasting positive change to the systems framing young people’s lives.
In our coming posts we’ll be explaining exactly how the Systems Changers programme works — the overarching rationale, the questions we’re exploring, how we’re trying to answer these, and the tools we’re using to do so. Most importantly— we’ll be sharing real-life examples of how our Systems Changers are testing out these new ways of thinking and working, and what ripples of change they are starting to see.
Have you used systems thinking or design methodologies in your part of the social sector? How did you get started on your learning journey? We’d love to hear from you!
