Making it Real – something wonderful this way comes?

By Caroline Speirs - discussing power, which is the theme of Co-production Week 2019. Caroline is Head of Think Local Act Personal (TLAP). A longer version of this blog is on the TLAP website

‘Don’t shift power. Share it’. This sums up the thoughts of Halima Khan, from the innovation foundation Nesta. Halima believes that sharing power can open up new solutions. That’s TLAP’s intention with Making it Real. It’s our new approach to what good citizen-focused care and support should look like. It’s a framework that creates space for a different model of power – a shared power.

By virtue of a great partnership, TLAP holds a privileged position that provides us with a multi-dimensional perspective. We get to speak to national leaders and decision makers. We meet regularly with practitioners and we work up close and personal with people with lived experience via our work with the National Co-production Advisory Group. Viewed through that lens, we get to see up close the gap between the rhetoric of what ought to be supportive policy and legislation and the reality of what’s happening on the ground.

The view isn’t always a good one. We see an exhausted colleague who accesses care and support questioning what he needs to do to live his life. We see a parent who worries about a system that cannot see what her grown up daughter has to offer society, only how much she costs.

What does any of this have to do with power?

Quite a bit I think. Clearly the impact of unprecedented cuts has some role in creating a harsh gate keeping system but it would be wrong to apportion all blame at the door of austerity. We have, after all, lived through financially healthier times but processes were no less harsh and stifling when we had a bit more money in the back pocket.

The beauty and the power of Making it Real is that, applied properly, it gently encourages a shift in relations. It generates a change in focus and supports a new outlook, one that is far more about relationships than transactions. An approach focused on a conversation, on what matters, on a life not a service.

Making it Real in Manchester

I began to see what a turbo charged version of this could look like in Manchester TLAP ran a session on Making it Real at the annual conference for Directors of Adult and Children’s Social Services. Something interesting happened Some barriers were dismantled and a few roadblocks removed. Not only did the world continue to spin on its axis but it did so with gusto. The challenge now is to harness that energy and that optimism to go further and deeper and create the transformational system change we’ve spoken about for so long. I am hopeful that with the arrival of the long-awaited social care green paper, we will see a clear commitment to working in this way.

Think Local Act Personal will do everything it can to support that.