OVIOF is a subsidiary project run by Shaping Our Lives as part of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Future of Rights and Welfare programme.
The OVIOF project is working to gather service users’ views on the future development of social policy. It has two strands of work with a national and local emphasis.
On a national level OVIOF has published a series of three booklets on key areas of social policy which aim to stimulate discussion on these issues by service users and user-controlled organisations.
You can download these booklets (as PDF files) by clicking the titles below:
Service users debate the future of the welfare state explores how the project was set up and reviews its findings. The project worked at two levels – nationally and through two local projects, one in Sheffield and the other in Shropshire. It focused on support services benefits and mental health and addressed benefits fraud, the need for holistic services, standards of services and charges for services and the medicalised approach to mental health issues.
The report will be of interest to users of all aspects of the welfare state and those involved in policy, practice and provision.
Contact us for information on all publications.
People who use services and their organisations have a great deal of knowledge and experience – by being service users we have seen what works and what doesn’t, we have found ways of getting our points across or have helped to create and/or change service provision.
As part of our work on strengthening the collective voice of service users we want to find out directly from service users and their organisations what kind of lessons they’ve learnt, examples of good practice and different ways of doing things.
The idea is to hold a series of focus groups and interviews with people across the country. The interviews, for example will be carried out using a variety of formats. This will be done in an attempt to meet people’s access needs.
Bob Williams Findlay our worker on the project is keen to hear from any user organisation or individual users who might be interested in taking part.
By working together it is hoped that we can play a central role in shaping services to meet our needs, influencing ‘good practice’ and creating a national voice of service users capable of both influencing policy makers at local, national and international levels and laying the ground for partnerships.
To help us with this project a small questionnaire has been written. This questionnaire will ask questions about you and/or your organisation. Once we have all the information returned to us we will be able to organise our membership and create a useful database.
Click here for a copy of the National Users Network questionnaire.
