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In January 2021, we were funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse to run a 12-week research and design project focused on reaching families remotely, in partnership with five charity partners from across the country. The whole research and design process culminated in the ‘9 steps for reaching families remotely’ - services and practitioners struggling to reach and engage with digitally excluded people.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the sprint 'Wrap-Up' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the sprint 'Develop' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the mid-sprint 'Develop' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Define' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Discover' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Inception' phase.
Read MoreWith 71% of community organisations in some parts of the voluntary sector having moved to online delivery since the COVID-19 crisis began, digital exclusion has become an even bigger obstacle to engaging those most in need than it was before. This is a particularly pressing issue for Early Years services, who support many families living in financially vulnerable households without internet access. As England endures another lockdown, Dartington Service Design Lab [Dartington] is working with a number of charities and families to develop and test different ways of supporting early years services to reach digitally excluded families. Here’s how we intend to do it...t ways of supporting early years services to reach digitally excluded families. Here’s how we intend to do it...
Read MoreWe talk about evidence a lot at Dartington, and using evidence ‘in new ways’. We try to put this in practical terms without too much jargon, but we know it still sounds pretty abstract. What do we actually mean? Our new report tries to bring it all down to earth.
Read MoreAt Dartington, we have been working with Salford Council to develop a systemic Theory of Change for their Better Outcomes New Delivery (BOND) programme. In the course of the work with managers and practitioners from across the BOND programme, we discovered that family resilience was felt to be central to all the programmes – but also under-explored. What did it look like, and how could it be supported? We worked with teams to create a testable model of the dynamic causes of family resilience to underpin and inform subsequent work within the systemic theory of change for all BOND programmes. Here’s what we learnt...
Read MoreThis year, youth services faced new challenges in engaging young people, particularly young people at risk of becoming involved in violence. As the Learning Partner for the Youth Endowment Fund’s special COVID-19 Grant round, we’ve had the opportunity to understand more about how organisations – ranging from grassroots charities to Britain’s largest local authorities – have managed to adapt programmes to continue to engage young people during the pandemic. In this blog, we look at how working with parents, carers and siblings can help organisations to maintain positive relationships with young people through the rest of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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