Overview
Despite our love of formal training, much of the evidence suggests that learning happens between people and is best facilitated by peers. Creating a learning environment is key to all our work and, although never directly funded, our focus during our work in Newsham Park was to create an enabling network. This meant that we worked hard to foster relationships between different groups within the local community.
These differences in ethnicity, age, and socio-economic status were only reinforced by the ways in which funding was targeted at particular groups or particular problems. To overcome that, we deliberately sought to keep all activities open to everyone, not only on paper but in spirit. We also sought to create a safe psychological environment that enabled people to connect across perceived differences and find common ground between them.
The evidence of the success of this informal network can be found in the number of ongoing friendships between former participants and the extent to which the network-enabled people to share resources, help, experience and advice in ways that did not encourage dependency or foster shame.
The Enabling Network
NEWSHAM PARK
The following organisations and initiatives Tree House is either working to support or aligns with their values around social prescribing, social wellbeing, mindfulness and connectivity.
The following organisations and initiatives Tree House is either working to support or aligns with their values around social prescribing, social wellbeing, mindfulness and connectivity.
SERVICES
About Tree House
Project Delivery
Investing in Individuals
At the core of our practice is the underpinned by the certain knowledge that everybody possesses innate capability and that all social systems hold untapped capacity as well as hidden assets. The evidence for the Five Ways to Wellbeing, developed by the New Economics Foundation, attests to this. To feel connected to the world, we need opportunities to get to know and learn from others. To feel motivated to pay attention to what is going on, we need rewards for doing so and for our observations and insights to be valued. We need to be actively engaged (physically or mentally) if we are to remain alert and have the chance to lead. We need, most of all, chances to contribute to the common good so that, no matter in how small a way, we feel that we have some distinctive part to play. These needs are part of our DNA and, in evolutionary terms, are what have got us here. So it should come as no surprise that playing with their grain makes for happier, healthier and more productive people.
Personal Development
We see leadership neither as something done from the top nor from the front but rather as the responsibility of all in a community. The size of that community could be a leadership team, a community group, a management team, a partnership, or one individual who seeks to improve the relationship they have with themselves. The intervention could range from an Action Research Project, a bespoke personal development or leadership programme, to much more informal learning systems including compeering, mentoring, coaching and whole system learning. These interventions awaken latent capacity by involving the people that will have long term responsibility for sustaining the initiative, whether it is about their own health and wellbeing or that of a population, project or product.
