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
Partners & Clients
Overview
Inspired by the work of Joanna Macey and Bo Lozoff (Active Hope and We're All Doing Time: A Guide to Getting Free) Tree House worked with Prison Staff and Inmates in the Therapeutic Wing of HMP Liverpool to design and deliver a personal development course for 18 prisoners which was delivered over a period of 9 months.
The programme, Escape From Fortress I, had as it’s premises that however traumatic or difficult our path to here we have the innate capacity to heal ourselves, indeed that we are, though others can help, the only one who can. The programme comprised of 12 sessions which were structured around the four cyclical stages described by Macey as the Work that Reconnects.
Our Activity
Like Brene Brown, she sees our biggest challenge as our resistance to facing up to the painful realities we find ourselves in, as individuals and as a planet. In order to really address our pain we need the courage to feel it at its darkest level even when we fear it might overwhelm us. It is the first stage of the process, appreciation, which is designed to give us that courage as explore ways of appreciating ourselves and the world around us. For the vast majority of those we worked with this was the first experience they ever had of being told by others that they had qualities which were deserving of appreciation.
Fuelled by a sense of worth, and a connection with others, course participants were better able to undertake the next stage of the process, Honouring the Pain. This required participants to think about, express, and seek to atone for pain they had experienced, and had inflicted on others. Expressing shame both within the group and, in subsequent phone calls and visits from family and friends, lessened the burden being carried by the group and gave them the mental and emotional space to undertake the next two phases of the programme which were, seeing with new eyes and going forward which were principally concerned with developing a series of commitment which the participants made to themselves relating to their future conduct.
Impact Review
Following the success of the programme in the prison the same programme was offered, with the support of the Workers Education Association, to local people in a programme called Learning How to Fly.
Like the prison programme this placed emphasis on liberating our own capacities as people and taking action to transform our own lives and like the prisoners, programme participants described the impact of the programme as akin to a liberation.