Framework community: one year on

In this blog we hear from David Hallam, Framework’s Organisational Participation Manager, reflecting on a year in post.

‘Involvement and participation are essential for creating inclusive, responsive and effective services and communities. They ensure that people have a voice in shaping the decisions that affect their lives’

Rebranding

As soon as I got the role of Organisational Participation Manager, I decided that my first task would be to meet some of the individuals that access our support services and ask them first-hand what they thought of the organisation’s current offer in terms or participation and involvement activities. Many responses I heard were: ‘it sounds boring’ , ‘why would I want to attend that’ and ‘what does that mean?’ I found this feedback to be pretty worrying because if we do not get the ‘buy in’ from our service users and make participation look appealing and exciting then what is the point in the first place right? This got my creative cogs whirring….time for a re-brand!

I took the decision to put together a working group to change the look and feel of all things related to participation and involvement across the organisation. I contacted a number of individuals which included past and current service users, members of the communications team and, of course, me!

We bounced around lots of ideas and the service users finally settled on the name Framework Community. I am very proud to say that the name Framework Community came entirely from our service users, so has actually been properly co-produced. The communications team also very kindly designed a number of logos which they presented to the focus group, and our service users also decided on our final logo.

I took our new name and logo to lots of meetings and discussions to showcase, and it was met with tons of positive encouragement from the Framework board, senior managers, directors, support staff and, very importantly, our service users.

Involvement Champions Network

My next task was to re-launch the Involvement Champions Network. This was in existence previously but unfortunately had taken a backseat due to many factors. I was an Involvement Champion before moving into the Participation Manager role so already had an insight into what the Network looked like. There were only a handful of Involvement Champions remaining, so I decided to put a call out to recruit new members.

We now have an amazing total of 59 Involvement Champions across our 66 services. We meet every two months to discuss all things participation and what has been happening in terms of participation across the organisation. I personally find these meetings to be one of the highlights in my calendar as I get to hear first hand all about the amazing work that is happening across the wider organisation.

Minimum Standards

Now that a healthy number of Involvement Champions were in post, it felt the appropriate time to discuss, agree and roll out some minimum standards in terms of participation and involvement activities. This was always going to be a huge task, especially taking into account the size of the organisation and the huge array of services that Framework offers, so the decision was made to only roll out the minimum standards to our core accommodation services in the first instance.

I, again, consulted with our service users and was very careful to ensure that I spoke to individuals that were at very different stages of their recovery journeys. I also consulted with a number of staff members from various services. The minimum standards were rolled out in June and were met with a very positive response on the whole from the organisation. Read more about our minimum standards here.

There has been lots of other participation and involvement changes that have been implemented in the last year, but I thought that I would concentrate on the three highlights above for the time being. So please keep your eyes peeled for future updates coming very soon!

If you’d like to find out more about Framework’s participation work, or even get involved yourself, you can contact Dave at david.hallam@FrameworkHA.org or on 07966 023738.