Working with people with lived experience of homelessness to identify challenges across housing pathways - Common Ambition
Initial mapping of the housing pathway
Project aims:
Inclusively supported the wonderful Common Ambition team and a brilliant steering group of people with lived experience of homelessness to co-create a detailed map of the current housing pathways across Brighton and Hove.
This map was created so that local services including the NHS and local government could then use this insight to help them prioritise areas for future improvements,
Project background:
The Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services, in order to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove.
You can read more about Common Ambitions' previous progress here.
Careful co-creation
This was always going to be a very delicate and complicated journey to map out. Within the Common Ambition steering group, we often come back to the founding principles which are to ensure that everyone feels safe, knows they don't have to share anything they don't feel comfortable sharing and that they can step out and access support at any time. Throughout this project, we designed the co-design sessions to always keep in mind the fact that this for many people within the steering group could be triggering. We made sure everyone was feeling comfortable and enjoying the experience.
Many people found the experience useful and therapeutic in some ways
Many people commented about how useful it was to map out this journey and hear other people's experiences when they felt comfortable sharing them.
People also mentioned that the whole experience felt really positive and so important to help local services identify core areas for improvements to help more people have a better journey from experiencing homelessness to being housed.
“Thank you Inclusively! The time, care and attention you put into ensuring this was done in a trauma-informed way was great. Our co-production group loved working with you!”.
- Nicky Pyper (she/her) Project Manager, Brighton and Hove Common Ambition
Outcomes and impact
We co-designed an end-to-end service map from the point at which someone is experiencing homelessness or thinks they are about to experience homelessness to being in a comfortable stable housing environment.
We built this in Miro so that it’s a living document that can keep being added to and used in a practical way by the NHS, local charities and the local government.
Learnings
We ran the co-design sessions in small groups so that we could help to facilitate all voices to be best heard, we then brought together all of the different housing pathways maps and pulled them into one draft map.
We then further co-designed this draft map (above to the left) and amended it to ensure everyone felt comfortable that the design of it was accurately portraying the housing pathways.
A big thanks to the Common Ambition team and the wonderful steering group - It has been such a pleasure to work with you. Thank you for welcoming me into the group, sharing your experiences and your brilliant energy.
Client: Common Ambition
Services: Service Design, User Research
Team: Charley Pothecary, Nicky Pyper, Nicki Menin, Steering group of people with lived experience