Jen Daffin is a Community Clinical Psychologist with a passion for social justice. She has 15 years experiences of working across NHS mental health and learning disability services and now works for a mental health and social change charity called Platfform. On Tuesday 24th of May Jen hosted a Conversations that Challenge event which explored
Trigger warning: this content contains mention of abuse in all forms. I’m Still a Risk, a poem by Simon Whitter. I was put into care at 11 years old, disposed of by my family, beaten black and blue. This wasn’t my choice, but I’m the risk. Raped and abused by people there to protect me.
NEF Consulting was commissioned to conduct a two-year evaluation of the Person-Led, Transitional and Strength Based (PTS) Response delivered by Mayday Trust in Northampton and its partner Changing Lives in Newcastle. The PTS brings together an asset-based approach and advantaged thinking to work with people transitioning out of homelessness and other difficult life transitions.
Oliver Townsend, Head of Partnerships and Practice at Platfform and Head of PTS and New System Alliance in Wales, explores the topic of professionalism and the experience of implementing the first PTS Coaching team in Wales. Professionalism is not a Bad ThingTM, but sometimes professionalisation can be. What is the difference? There’s a lot
Nell Hardy is an actor, writer and theatre facilitator with lived experience of homelessness and mental health hospitalisation. Her new company Response Ability Theatre works with trauma survivors and care providers to improve communicative confidence and general wellbeing in both groups, and led our discussion on overcoming the barriers to empathetic communication with people
Homelessness doesn’t start with not having somewhere to live: it starts the second you don’t feel safe in the place where you live. It doesn’t stop when you have a roof over your head: it stops when you feel your home is somewhere you can rely on physically and emotionally. It’s a social state,
When I hear the word risk, I’m often filled with feelings of dread. I haven’t wanted to deal with it, hoping that it doesn’t come up so I can focus on the things I feel positive about. Whilst I have prided myself on delivering a truly person-led approach with individuals, when risk has come up,
Why we need to talk more about how ends justify the means In discourse around public finances and the continued, rather impressive ability, of this current government to blame a previous (but three) Prime Minister’s administration for their austere state; something you often hear is that the ends justify the means. George Gideon Oliver Osborne
Our journey with the New System Alliance. ‘Well, it’s been a strange decade so far. Buzzwords… I’m a great believer that we can judge the times we live in by looking at the words we never heard before in the last decade, that have come to us in the first few years of this
Awkward Questions In my capacity as an autism commissioner across health and social care, I spoke to the mother of a 17 year old girl with autism, who was out of school, self-harming and suicidal. She was too anxious and depressed to leave the house; she barely spoke. Soon after starting senior school, she fell
