This project has been going informally for some years but funding from SCIE has enabled ideas to become a reality and the networking site at www.solnetwork.org.uk has now been running for just over two years. There are over 300 organisations registered as members on the site. Have a look at the site to find out more!
This work has been funded by the Social Care Institute for Excellence. Shaping Our Lives ran a reference group for some time which helped inform policy in this area and worked on a number of publications. See the publications section of this site for details. Recently we undertook four regional consultations about user involvement in social work education to find out different ways in which people are involved and how this could be further promoted. Consultation groups were held in Chelmsford, London, Worcester and Wiltshire during October, and the report will be available in the new year. If you have any experience of being involved in social work education, we would be pleased to hear from you.
This one year project is now complete. We are currently waiting to see if a new bid for a three year project to EHRC is successful. This will allow us to take this project further.
During the autumn of 2008 Shaping Our Lives supported five service user and/or disabled people's organisations to hold networking events in their own regions. They each invited other local service user organisations to give presentations and participate in these 'get togethers'. Each organisation told Shaping Our Lives what people had said during these events and a report was written.
Click here for Relationship Matters full Report
Click here for Relationship Matters summary report
This is a three year project near completion and is funded by Department of Health ‘Section 64’. Click here for more about Beyond the Usual Suspects.
This is a two year project which started in January 2006, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It worked with eight partner services across the UK to develop person-centred support. Go to our Publications page to access the reports that have been published during the project.
This was a project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Click here for the report on this project, 'Making User Involvement Work - supporting service user networking and knowledge'
Shaping Our Lives set up four development projects in the year 2000 to test out the findings that came out of its initial research on user perspectives on outcomes.
These four projects were based with the following groups:
Service Users’ Action Forum – Wakefield: working with a group of older people
Ethnic Disabled People Emerged (EDGE) – Manchester
Footprints (UK) and Walthamstow Black Mental Health Service User Group – North London
Black User Group – West London
Click here for more about the Outcomes Development Projects.
OVIOF is a subsidiary project run by Shaping Our Lives as part of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Future of Rights and Welfare programme.
Shaping Our Lives started as a research project in 1996 looking at service users’ perspectives on outcomes. It was a response to service providers, politicians and academics placing an increasing emphasis on assessing support services in terms of their outcomes, ie their results.
Early in 2000 Shaping Our Lives undertook a short project to assess users’ views on the codes of conduct and practice being introduced for social care workers and employers. The views expressed reflect on the proposed codes and on the general qualities and standards that users want from social care.
