Access to Justice for Disadvantaged Communities

Access to justice for all, regardless of the ability to pay, has been a core democratic value. But this basic human right has come under threat through wider processes of restructuring, with an increasingly market-led approach to the provision of welfare. Professionals and volunteers in Law Centres in Britain are struggling to provide legal advice and access to welfare rights to disadvantaged communities. Drawing upon original research, this unique study explores how strategies to safeguard these vital services might be developed in ways that strengthen rather than undermine the basic ethics and principles of public service provision. The book explores how such strategies might strengthen the position of those who provide, as well as those who need, public services, and ways to empower communities to work more effectively with professionals and progressive organisations in the pursuit of rights and social justice agendas more widely

Access to Justice for Disadvantaged Communities

Access to justice for all, regardless of the ability to pay, has been a core democratic value. But this basic human right has come under threat through wider processes of restructuring, with an increasingly market-led approach to the provision of welfare. Professionals and volunteers in Law Centres in Britain are struggling to provide legal advice and access to welfare rights to disadvantaged communities. Drawing upon original research, this unique study explores how strategies to safeguard these vital services might be developed in ways that strengthen rather than undermine the basic ethics and principles of public service provision. The book explores how such strategies might strengthen the position of those who provide, as well as those who need, public services, and ways to empower communities to work more effectively with professionals and progressive organisations in the pursuit of rights and social justice agendas more widely

Making It Together

An evaluative study of Creative Families, an arts and mental health partnership between South London Gallery and the Southwark Parental Mental Health Tea

Silver Stories Evaluation Report

This report is an evaluation of Silver Stories , a research and training partnership of nine organisatio ns from six countries. The project brought together expertise in digital storytelling, community engagement and education to train professionals working with community groups and elderly people. Silver Stories ran from October 2013 to September 2015 and was funded by the Eu ropean Commission’s Learning Programme, under the Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Transfer of Innov ation sub -­‐ programme . This programme seeks to adopt and transfer existing innovative practices to new settings that included sectors, target groups and countries, made achievable by working with transnational partners. This evaluation report is a key proj ect deliverable to explore the efficacy of the project in delivering its aims , namely to: • Adapt and transfer learning methods from E xtending Creative Practice (E CP ) across the whole partnership and to two new countries and, working to provide VET for a new target professional group – i.e. trainers and employees working in the caring professions – across the whole partnership. • Establish a means for d igital s torytelling to be incorporated into the on -­‐ going training of professionals in all the partner countries. More detail on the evaluation methodology can be found in Appendix 1 This report considers the project delivery against the research aims and objectives as set out in the original project app lication. We draw on a range of sources and data including material provided by the project partners. The report reviews delivery, ident ifies achievements and successes as well as lessons learnt throughout . In doing so it makes recommendations about how the work pioneered through Silver Stories might usefully be taken forward

Changing Places, Changing Lives: assessing the Impact of Housing Association Regeneration

The Changing Places, Changing Lives research into L&Q’s ‘community impact’ demonstrates the unique position of housing associations as social landlords. It examines seven neighbourhoods, which span two periods in urban governance: the area-based initiatives of the last Labour government, which aimed to regenerate and ‘renew’ specific neighbourhoods characterised by large swathes of public housing; and the current housing policy of the coalition government, which places an emphasis on decentralisation and localism (rather than centralised spatial strategies). With the demise of regeneration monies, such as the Single Regeneration Budget and New Deal for Communities, and the considerable cuts to the budgets of local authority services, the ability of social landlords to attract mobile capital, nurture indigenous capacity and talent and provide community resources at this time is particularly significant as they shape urban neighbourhoods

Getting to know you: Engagement and relationship building: First interim national positive futures case study research report

This report represents the culmination of the first phase of the Positive Futures (PF) Case Studies Research Project rather than a definitive set of findings as such. Rather like the PF programme itself it is very much a work in progress which is evolving all the time in the context of the action research approach we have adopted. This approach involves a cycle of action and reflection, with both the projects and research adapting in relation to the themes that emerge from the study as it progresses. Nevertheless whilst this element of the research has been concerned as much with the establishment of relations with projects and participants as investigating the relationships between them, we have begun to identify a number of tentative themes and findings. These themes are presented in a fashion which is intended to guide the future direction of projects every bit as much as to gain abstract theoretical insight. Yet this recognition of the importance of practicality and direction should not distract from the importance of gaining a wider contextual feel for the programme. For whilst this summary is intended to highlight the key themes emerging from the research and the policy and practice issues associated with them, it is in the detail of the main report that a full appreciation of the PF approach emerges. It is from the more narrative accounts in these subsequent parts that we have drawn the conclusions and recommendations presented here and which will provide the baselines against which we assess future progress. Indeed these accounts are themselves drawn from three regional reports focused on the seven case studies that constitute the overall national research project

Country reviews of social assistance in crises: A compendium of rapid assessments of the nexus between social protection and humanitarian assistance in crisis settings

© 2021 Institute of Development Studies. This is an open access report available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/16675This collection brings together brief overviews of the social assistance landscape in eight fragile and conflict-affected settings in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East: Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen. These overviews were prepared as part of Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research, a multi-year programme (2020–24) supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the UK government. BASIC Research aims to inform policy and programming on effective social assistance in situations of crisis, including for those who are experiencing climate-related shocks and stressors, protracted conflict and forced displacement.UKAi

Rethinking the sociology of stigma

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. The conceptual understanding of stigma which underpins most sociological research has its roots in the groundbreaking account penned by Erving Goffman in his best-selling book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). In the 50 years since its publication, Goffman's account of stigma has proved a productive concept, in terms of furthering research on social stigma and its effects, on widening public understandings of stigma, and in the development of anti-stigma campaigns. However, this introductory article argues that the conceptual understanding of stigma inherited from Goffman, along with the use of micro-sociological and/or psychological research methods in stigma research, often sidelines questions about where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes. As Simon Parker and Robert Aggleton argue, what is frequently missing is social and political questions, such as 'how stigma is used by individuals, communities and the state to produce and reproduce social inequality'. This article expands on Parker and Aggleton's critique of the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma, through an examination of the anti-stigma campaign Heads Together. This high-profile campaign launched in 2016 seeks to 'end the stigma around mental health' and is fronted by members of the British Royal Family. By thinking critically with and about this campaign, this article seeks to both delineate the limitations of existing conceptual understandings of stigma and to begin to develop a supplementary account of how stigma functions as a form of power. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy. The final part of this introduction details the articles to follow, and the contribution they collectively make to the project of rethinking the sociology of stigma. This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating it