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Participation, relationships and place

Over the last three years, we have come together as a diverse group of people who have a stake in making Oxford better for everyone. Our relationships deepened during the pandemic, and the support of Lankelly Chase has enabled us to work collaboratively to shape a more inclusive and equal city.

We have focused our efforts on three different inquiries that we believe can advance social change in our city. What is an action inquiry? In plain English – a group of people setting out to do something that disrupts the system, leads to learning and helps us influence change.

The three inquiries, set out below, bring together different organisations to draw insight and share the learning with others interested in this work:

How can we design services for humans?

We engage with services – like health, education and social support – every day, and they can be especially important during difficult periods in our lives. But sometimes it feels like those services aren’t designed for real people – they’re set up for organisations, for tick boxes or for a stereotypical ‘service user’ who doesn’t exist. We want to change that, by creating and developing services that are responsive and effective – that really work for people.

How can we shift power and decision-making to people whose lives are directly affected by those decisions?

We’ve been exploring ways of doing this, and of supporting people to meaningfully take the lead in areas that are important to them. Those with power are often not diverse or representative of the people they are trying to serve. Who needs more power in communities and what are the different ways in which we can share power?

How can we implement approaches to measurement and evaluation that help us be more creative, more honest, more human and more effective in our work?

The way we evaluate has a fundamental impact on what we prioritise in our work, who holds power and how we listen. We want to move away from evaluation feeling like a distraction, driven by chasing targets, to something that enables us to learn about complex problems and the people experiencing them, so we can adapt and improve our approach.

All this work is currently managed by a network of people who want to have an impact across the system and beyond their own organisations. Part of our plans for the future are to explore how we can embed this approach in long-term structures that sustain collaborative and systemic approaches for Oxford.

You can find out more about our work across these online resources, and follow our journey as we try to explore and learn how to bring about a more just and inclusive future.

Sara Fernandez, Oxford Hub

Sarah Cassidy, The Old Fire Station

The Old Fire Station used to mainly use form-filling and box-ticking to evaluate the impact of our work. We often found that these approaches to evaluation undermined the relationships we built with people, distracted from the work in hand, and failed to reflect the complexity of the work and people involved. In 2017, we decided to try something different: Storytelling.

Based on the Most Significant Change technique, Storytelling involves having conversations with different people about their experience of a project, and what it’s meant to them. These conversations are transcribed and edited into stories that capture the key things people said, in their own voice and words. Once we have a collection of stories, we then bring people together to discuss the themes and learning which emerge from those stories.

Over the last two years, we’ve gone from using Storytelling internally to building a local network of 25 organisations and counting who embrace this approach. As our Storytelling work has evolved and grown, so too has the wider conversation in Oxford around more meaningful approaches towards measurement. We’ve seen ‘learning pods’ at Oxford City Council, the piloting of Clear Signal – a programme which generates data with residents in a participatory, bottom-up manner – and partners from across the city using Storytelling to evaluate impact.

In 2021 Oxford Hub and the Old Fire Station initiated an Action Inquiry on Meaningful Measurement, with support from friends at Active Oxfordshire, Oxford City Council, African Families in the UK and Lankelly Chase. Through this Inquiry we are bringing partners together to learn about meaningful measurement, test tools in specific areas of the city, and use the findings to influence the system locally.

Meaningful Measurement

The breadth of partners across Oxford using Storytelling, and the growing energy around other approaches, indicate a change taking place: people and organisations are moving away from traditional measurement models towards more creative, human ways of evaluating.

Conventional evaluation approaches often rely on pre determined outcomes and Key Performance Indicators – where we set goals in advance which become benchmarks against which success is measured. This can lead to a culture where people prioritise meeting targets and demonstrating ‘success’ – something that prevents people from responding creatively to the problem in front of them and allowing for the complexity of people’s lives.

We love Storytelling because:

• It doesn’t determine outcomes in advance – it allows people to describe what change looks and feels like for them.
• It’s good for measuring impact that is unexpected, emergent, personalised and diverse, and really understanding how change happens.
• Hearing stories in peoples’ own voices helps us to listen and connect on a human level.
• It’s fun! Participants enjoy telling the story of a project, and it is a creative, meaningful way to say goodbye to a project.

There are limitations (it can be time intensive, costly, and tends to emphasise what went well and focuses less on what didn’t) but we hope that through learning with others we can evolve Storytelling, experiment with other methodologies, and use the stories we have to generate meaningful insights about the city of Oxford, and how services are designed and delivered across the country.

Shifting perspectives

However, this is about more than just finding new tools – it’s about a bigger shift in perspective away from a performance agenda, towards one centred around learning.

The evaluation approaches and tools we used are often shaped by the reporting requirements of funders, commissioners and governing bodies. To shift away from a performance agenda towards a learning agenda, we need people to feel empowered to experiment, work creatively, acknowledge failures and learn through reflection.

This culture shift can only happen if those involved in setting the agenda – commissioners, funders, governing bodies – are also part of the evolving conversation around more meaningful approaches towards measurement based on listening carefully and which encourage shifts in power.

How can we move towards ways of measuring impact that enable us to learn about complex problems and the people experiencing them, so we can listen, adapt and improve? How do we find ways of understanding what real change is taking place and how? How do we make evaluation a manageable process, which informs commissioning and service design? These are some of the questions we are beginning to explore in more depth through the Meaningful Measurement Action Inquiry. Over the next year we’ll be working together to learn more about meaningful measurement, experiment with and test different approaches and use what we learn to help shift the way we listen, collaborate and work towards more ‘human friendly’ systems in Oxford. This will include further developing our storytelling work, piloting using resident led data collection through Clear Signal, and exploring wider evaluation methodologies. This work will be central to our conversations at Marmalade 2022.

Old Fire Station Oxford · Marmalade Stories

Explore Marmalade, our annual festival:

Parent Power

Parent Power works directly with families who are keen to lead changes in their own lives – helping themselves, their children and their communities to thrive.

Building individual and community power amongst parents

Emma Anderson, Oxford Hub

Why Parent Power?

Intergenerational disadvantage means that a child’s future social and economic outcomes are closely linked to, and determined by, their parents’ outcomes. However, as a society, it can often seem more urgent — as well as more straightforward — to focus on children. They are seen as innocent and blameless; the state must keep them from harm. The combination of high profile child deaths and serious case reviews, along with austerity and cuts to statutory children’s services have left a children’s services system that is focused on child protection, assessments of risk and exercising of statutory powers over families rather than an appreciation of individual parent selfhood and the complexity of families’ lives. Statutory services, as a result, have a heavy focus on protecting children from harm but all too often, we fail to nurture, listen to and give agency and power to the people who actually have the most power and skin in the game when it comes to breaking this cycle and improving outcomes for children. This is of course their parents!

Parent Power, a collaboration between Oxford Hub and African Families in the UK, with support from Lankelly Chase, has been working to change this. Focusing on the Blackbird Leys area of Oxford, Parent Power aims to give more power to parents at an individual and community level to empower them to make change for themselves, their children and other parents. Parents support other parents to lead change in their own lives and participate in their community.

There’s a reason that the name draws attention to power. The relationships between families and the systems in place to protect children (schools, charities and social services) are infused with unequal power dynamics. The conventional approach of statutory services involves having power over parents, managing risk by ensuring that parents are complying with an agency-led process — one that is often poorly explained to families. This is evident in interactions between individuals too, with power dynamics between individual professionals and parents often leaving parents feeling marginalised and disempowered, rather than more confident, better resourced and more able to keep their children safe.

The Parent Power team at a team learning day

Individual and Community Power

Parent Power is working to shift these power dynamics at an individual and community level:

Individual power- Parents should have voice, choice and agency about decisions affecting them and their children. They should choose what they want to change about their lives and how that change happens. Parent Power works to give parents the resources, confidence and skills that they need to make change for themselves and their children.
Community power- Parents have a wealth of knowledge and assets within themselves. Parents can make change for themselves and other families when they are well organised and have access to community resources. This might mean services which are designed by parents, for the benefit of parents or having direct access to funding for them to set up their own projects. We can bring parents together to share their problems, how they have overcome challenges in the past and what support is on offer. Parent Power can also help parents realise their power as a collective in affecting change. When parents come together, effectively, they can make their voice heard, change services or create more opportunities for children and families.

It is really important to think about power in these two different ways — solely focusing on individual power misses the opportunity to build more collective approaches in communities. Parents acting together can change mindsets and perspectives for agencies and the ways in which they interact with families.

Decision-making Power

One of the ways in which Parent Power is shifting power to parents is through its own design and implementation. Parents, with Lived Experience of using support services, are fully involved in the design and implementation of Parent Power in Oxford. They have the opportunity and support to design how Parent Power works, what it focuses on, how we speak about it and who we collaborate with. Parents are employed and trained to support other parents, in Parent Peer Supporter roles.

This approach is essential to role model some of the changes that we want to see in the system, for everyone to see parents as resourceful and able to drive change for their families and in their communities. In practice, this may involve connecting a family to an early years group, helping a group of mums study to pass their driving theory test, being there for a mum who has social services involved in her life or working together to make the leisure centre more accessible to local families. At the heart of this work is not what the parents are doing, but how they are doing it: in a way that builds power for themselves and their communities. This is transformational for their children’s future outcomes and wellbeing.

Advice and tips

We have tested this approach in a specific geographical area with a specific demographic so not all of our learning will be relevant. However, some things we have learnt are:

Putting parents in leadership roles, with the right support at the right time, leads to creativity, innovation and more trusted relationships in the community- our Parent Peer Supporters have been amazing!!!
Staff who are in roles where they are regularly drawing on their lived experiences should have regular support and emotional supervision to process experiences and ensure that they are not taking on too much of the emotional burden.
A diverse range of parents involved in the design is important to ensure that communications and opportunities are accessible and interesting to a range of residents and parents from different backgrounds.
Working in collaboration with other agencies such as schools, local authorities and other charitable groups leads to a) greater outreach and deeper understanding of the views in the community b) opportunities to influence others to try things differently and work with families and parents differently
Having a physical space in the community for parents to use and for members to create connections in the community has been hugely beneficial- we are in the Blackbird Leys community centre and it’s amazing how many connections we make every day!
Strategy and plans should be responsive and emerging to what is going on at the time. This allows for more opportunity for collaboration with others and genuine leadership from parents who get involved throughout the process.