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
Overview
In partnership with animator Tom Foolery and with support from Bangor University and an Amsterdam council exchange project, we gave voice to the sense of alienation felt by many of those who had participated in our Newsham Park based activities.
This reflected the sense that, in order to get help, you needed to focus on your disabilities, rather than your abilities, and emphasizing your conformity to a category of need, rather than investing in your own potential for learning and healing. So many felt trapped in what we began to describe as the ‘Normalizer’. Towards the end of our five years of practice in Newsham Park, we sought to communicate this experience more widely through an animation. Our aim was to convey this sense of being trapped in a world that invites you to feel powerless. The response surprised us.
Rather than struggling to identify with this experience, most of the participants, whatever their role or position, identified with that sense that the worlds in which they lived and worked were no longer about people but rather about things.
The Normalizer
Partners & Clients
