In the span of just half a year, we have made great progress on our Shifting Power work both within the Early Action project and across our entire organisation.
In the span of just half a year, we have made great progress on our Shifting Power work both within the Early Action project and across our entire organisation.
Underpinning all this is our Client and Lived Experience strategy, which we kick-started this year. Progress is underway on our 2023 action plan, with a number of key developments. Among these, a feedback log takes centre stage, capturing informal insights that, once overlooked, now help us in our learning journey in a more formalised way. What’s more, all our projects now have KPIs that focus on client engagement and the collaborative evolution of our services. We’ve also launched a feedback survey across all projects, a first- time endeavour to gather the perspectives and suggestions of our clients.
One member of staff and two volunteers (all with lived experience) participated in the Refugee Action EbE Leadership training. The learnings of this they are now sharing with the wider organisation. Another staff member has also received facilitation training. All the Project Officers have lived experience and they are taking on more leadership roles within the project. The training offered to our team members via EAR has really helped our staff and volunteers develop in these areas of leadership and facilitation.
Building on this, the InterAction project now also has a EbE catering team for the drop-in sessions that is self-organised and run by lived experience volunteers. Refugee Week was another great example of shifting power where our EbE volunteers organised the whole talent show event. In previous years, this has been organised by staff. Through such initiatives, the volunteers are getting chances to have greater ownership and are more involved in decision-making.
From these developments, we’ve realised that staff have realised that lived experience volunteers yearn for a voice in decision- making and project ownership. A revelation that has translated into a significant increase in our capacity. The reluctance to burden volunteers has been replaced by a newfound realisation – they actively seek engagement as part of their personal growth, ushering us into a realm of shared learning and development.
As a result of these developments, our staff have seen the way lived experienced volunteers want the opportunity to be more involved and take more decisions. This in turn has helped us increase capacity. Beforehand, we didn’t want to ask too much of the volunteers, but as it turns out, they actually want to be involved - not least for the personal development they get too. Overall, it has been a great learning curve for us.