I’m working with several organisations to challenge and change adult social care language and practice.
All my work involves creating space for people to reflect on language and practice, how they are linked, and how both need to change to rewrite social care.
Me and Tricia Nicoll think too much of the language people use in and about social care reveals and shapes attitudes and ways of working that prevent people from living gloriously ordinary lives. We believe that the language of social care should be ordinary. Everyday words about everyday life. And we think our language should be glorious. Wonderful words about flourishing lives.
We’re working with local councils and other social care organisations who want to rehumanise their language, reconnect practice with personal and organisational principles and reimagine care and support.
Edgar Cahn referred to co-production as “a different imagining of the world we know”. However, me and Tricia Nicoll think that in too many organisations, co-production is seen as extra work on top of the day job. something else we have to do on a Thursday afternoon in a meeting room with dodgy coffee and a value pack of custard creams (if you’re lucky)?
In an attempt to bust some of the myths and complexity, to return to Edgar Cahn’s core principles, and to keep co-production gloriously ordinary, we’ve come up with Two Bottom Lines and Four Tests and a Co-production Sandwich.
We’re also running two programmes to support organisations to rethink their approach to co-production. Our programmes are an invitation to be brave and step away from everything that feels comfortable…
The Social Care Future Community of Support brings together people working in, or closely with, local councils who have signed up to the Social Care Future vision, offering time and space for inspiration, support, and practical suggestions to plan and act locally.
I’m co-facilitating two of the themes in this year’s Community: sharing power through co-production and early action and asset-based commissioning.
Partners4Change work with local authorities to replace the bureaucratic, transactional ‘assessment for services’ culture with The Three Conversations – a relational approach that focuses on what really matters to people.
I’m working with Partners4Change and a number of councils who are learning how to adopt The Three Conversations approach to improve the experiences and lives of people seeking and drawing on support and the morale and satisfaction of workers, and to make more sustainable use of resources.
“I love working with Bryony. She has a quiet and gentle way of cutting to the heart of the utter stupidity of the language (and more) that surrounds the thing we call social care.
She has people and humanity at the heart of everything she does and I challenge anyone not to read one of her blogs and go, ‘ohhhh…..of course!’“
Tricia Nicoll, Gloriously Ordinary Lives
“I first met Bryony with Sam Newman from Partners4Change when we were developing our Three Conversations approach, to help us have better conversations with people who draw on care and support. Bryony was such a breath of fresh air and a real inspiration to me. Social Work practice in Adult Social Care had become so prescriptive and more about savings that doing the right thing for people, over the last few years with Partners4Change & Bryony’s inspiration and her ongoing support through the Social Care Future Community of Support, we have continued to change that narrative and seen colleagues making a real difference. We are so grateful to her ongoing commitment to making social care better.“
Rewriting Social Care 