Social Innovation Lab for Kent
From Future of Local Services to the Public
What is SILK?
SILK (Social Innovation Lab for Kent) is a new approach to strategic policy development for Kent County Council (KCC).
KCC wanted to develop a more creative approach to tackling some of the most tough challenges that the council faces. This was an approach that explicitly starts with people and aspirations, rather than existing services and problems with the aim to understand how to build capacity to work in a truly citizen-centric way across the council, on the basis of lessons learnt from SILK’s pilot projects.
SILK has two core missions:
• It aims to provide a ‘safe space’ and a creative approach to tackling any number of strategic challenges, in order to develop new responses to apparently intractable problems, based on the realities of people’s lives.
• It aims to build the capacity and skills of staff across the Council – and its partners – to focus on citizens and experiences, rather than services and organisations, when developing strategy and implementation plans.
Generating innovations from gaining a deeper understanding of how people’s everyday lives work is not easy and KCC obtained funding from the national Innovation Forum for local Government for a pilot, reflecting the growing national interest in these issues.
The pilot tested thinking in practice through two ‘demonstration’ projects. The first focused on families at risk in Kent, and the second on how people access information about social care, and the role of the on-line directory in this.
Learning from what worked and what didn’t in these projects, a ‘person-centred methodology for local government’ has been created.
KCC feel that early successes of this approach include:
• The families at risk project has shaped thinking on the Parents Strategy, and it formed the basis of the KCC application to become a pathfinder authority for the Social Exclusion Taskforce’s work in this area.
• A partnership with the Digital Inclusion team at CLG (including £20k of funding) to explore ways in which technology can better support families at risk.
• Focused work with the Sheerness Children’s Centre to find new ways of engaging fathers in family life, which could inform thinking about how to do this across the county.
References
www.goddardpayne.com/we-do/current-projects/social-innnovation-lab-kent-si/
www.enginegroup.co.uk/latest/news_page/service_innovation_in_the_public_sector
