Beyond Services
Everyday patterns to shift systems towards equity
This piece is part of exploratory work we have been doing into everyday patterns, and the role and power of re-patterning in systems change. In our introduction we shared seven patterns we have identified across our work and that of others that go some way to making visible active re-patterning for equity and powersharing. Here we examine the first one: Beyond Services.
This piece was written across 2022 and reflects our thinking at this time.
Fostering wellbeing requires more than a service system.
In order to thrive whānau and communities need strong, healthy ecologies of support and relationships.
This pattern focuses on moving beyond services as the first response of addressing needs, to a much broader ecology of support for wellbeing. This involves recognition and activation of natural networks and resources; and an activation of expertise and capital in different ways.
Through this pattern we are able to see and recognise the many layers of relationship, supports and healing that create a fabric of wellbeing for people, whānau, communities.
Ultimately, however, it is not just a recognition that is required but a realignment of power, value and capital across the ecology.
The model of services that has grown around public sector systems focuses on creating access to interventions ‘for’ people to address their needs.
This focus on ‘public services’ has proved valuable for addressing technical and clear needs (like essential utilities, building roads, collecting waste or responding to basic medical needs). However when ‘needs’ are complex or when people’s strengths are overshadowed by intersecting needs, ‘public services’ are increasingly struggling to support people to thrive.
Access to many services has been framed by criteria (efficiency); rationing (scarcity) and assessed need, linked to pre-determined services (often with binary eligibility determinations). At best human services in these spaces are providing access to only a shallow layer of crisis services that may address immediate issues, and at worst, they are actually perpetuating inequality and becoming part of the problem rather than enabling solutions.
Over recent years there have been attempts to engage more actively with people and families, so we’ve seen everything from participation to co-design in order for services to find ways to work more ‘with the people’.
There are now emerging opportunities to see beyond and between, so that services and service providers become just one part of a much bigger, deeper, broader and more diverse ecosystem of wellbeing.
Growing ecologies of support and wellbeing is not just about shifting the relationships between whānau and service providers, it’s about transforming what constitutes support; how wellbeing is generated; and what kinds of expertise is valued along the way.
