What follows is the start of my action research project deconstructing of the Outcomes Star, a metric bureaucracy instated in various support-need junctures which the person receiving support has to fill in and go over with the person who is giving the support. This is one of various types of bureaucracy which people have to face (both citizen and worker). Read more…
What follows is the executive summary and the recommendations which I make from my initial analysis of the bureaucratic burden which exists in the support-need juncture. You can read the prologue ‘Action Research: The Situation I am In; The View From The Other Side’ by clicking HERE. It gives an account of how this action research project came about and explains some of the motivations driving the project. Read more…
What follows is the writing up of my lived experience of struggling with the over bureaucratisation of my life. It became a project when several years ago I realised that I was going between several agencies all tasked with supporting me trying to rehabilitate from a life where I had been homeless. I fell into what is categorised as ‘multiple needs’. Read more…
Ive been working with Glenn Liddall and People Know How for a little over a year now, and I have been impressed at the way he, and they, are working. When Glenn approached me originally with ideas for collaboration and a new way of working towards goals which made a positive difference to various stakeholders (rather than a single group), I was interested to see what he meant and what the realities were.
Glenn was speaking about an integrated way of working which identified and valued the qualities which people have, and then taking them into a setting whereby they developed skills around a real life framework to tackle various socially pertinent issues.
Action science is an inquiry into how we design and implement action in relation to one another. It is a science of practice, whether the professional practice of administrators, educators, and psychotherapists or the everyday practice of people as member of families and organizations. Action science calls for basic research and theory building that are intimately related to social intervention. Clients are participants in a process of public reflection that attempts both to comprehend the concrete details of particular cases and to discover and test propositions of a general theory. Read more…
In order to gain the energy and understanding to address the complex challenges and totally reshape society for both ecological and social justice, there is a rise in ideas advocating a wider paradigm within which to place our actions. Berry (1999), Berry and Swimme (1992) and Swimme and Tucker (2011) explore humanity’s place within the universe. They propose a New Universe Story, a way of exploring the world which sees human beings take our place within our 13,800,000,000 year old universe. From studying the social as well as ecological challenges facing humanity, Korten sees that only through ‘Earth as community’ can we find a comprehensive story which will enable us to address these issues.
For me a wonderful expression of how we might find our way into this ancient history is through cultural historian Thomas Berry. Berry proposes the idea of the Dream of the Earth, not a human dream but the dream of the whole Earth community (1988). How might we learn to express and understand what the earth wants rather than ourselves as a single species? How might we learn to see the Dream of the Earth as for ‘all the children’ not simply the human children of the earth but ‘for the children who swim beneath the waves of the sea’ and the ‘children who roam over the land and the winged ones who fly with the wind’? (Berry, 1999). Read more…