Power.
What does it mean to you? Where does it come from? How can it be created and used to bring about positive change in health, care and wellbeing?
All that and more will be explored at the ‘Future of People Powered Health’ event today (2 May) in central London.
Hundreds of citizens, professionals, campaigners, commissioners and policy makers are gathering at The Brewery to share their experiences, listen to innovation in practice and be inspired to take action.
Our Grapevine CEO Clare Wightman will lead a session at the event on ‘Good Help – the art of not knowing what is best’. Essentially this would turn ‘bad help’ on its head – away from fixing people’s problems for them and towards acknowledging they have their own power. With this power comes the unique motivations that enable change to be achieved and sustained.
Clare’s co-presenters are Rich Wilson from Osca and Esther Flanagan from Nesta, authors of Good and Bad Help – a project that sets out to create a good practice guide for good help by bringing together case studies of where this is working most effectively from all over the UK. Click to read about this in more depth.
Clare will tell Rishard’s story to today’s audience to demonstrate how good help altered the course of his life. At the time he and his mum met Grapevine, 15-year-old Rishard seemed headed towards not finishing his education because of his “violent” behaviour. This behaviour was really borne out of frustration with wanting an ordinary teenage life, making friends and traveling to school independently.
When we asked what he wanted, Rishard – a young man with Down’s syndrome – told us simply “I want to be on Eastenders”. Through a determined plan and the right connections, he is now an established actor with performances on Channel 4 and at Birmingham Hippodrome amongst his credits.
He’s pursuing his dream and all because we asked what it was, we listened carefully and we were able to make a difference.
Follow the conversation on Twitter using #peoplepoweredhealth.
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