Bedford Row Family Project supports families affected by imprisonment. I was Project Leader of the Project for over 13 years, and I now work there in a sessional, part-time capacity. It is a training centre as well as a Family Support Project. In 2008 we designed (and in 2009 delivered) the first two-year course in what we called Family Support and Crisis Intervention, its aim being to upskill enthusiastic people in communities who wanted to make a difference.
It was towards the end of the first Course in 2011 that I first thought that I’d do a bit of writing! At that time the idea that I had was to write a working manual to be used as a guide by practitioners who would wish, (following suitable and thorough training) to be involved in the facilitation of that Course within Bedford Row or similar agency.
I intended that the proposed manual would be used by students or any interested practitioner, to gain a greater understanding of the origin and intended impact of the Course. This manual – presently a work in progress, as we say – would be based largely on the Sub-Chapter on the principal elements in the Chapter on Training later in the blog.
Co-facilitating the courses and learning a lot from my colleagues Martin O’Sullivan and Ray Wallace and students – all of whom were very grounded in the realities of life – I began to have ideas about how elements in what I already described as the natural world influence our efforts to support people in distress. I then pondered on how I’d include them in different courses, training etc. as I believed that more knowledge and awareness of them would help us to do our job better.
I also believe that they are accessible (that is, relatively easy for most people to understand), and, they seem like common sense – always important in community work!
Also, as I stated in a previous post when I mentioned physics, they are not covered (in any great detail anyway) on mainstream social work, social care, youth and community, psychology, psychotherapy, management or leadership courses or training.
However as I began to write the manual I found myself more interested in writing a book on the theories, concepts and propositions that serve to inform design of organisations (and programmes) within the context of the power structures within which good work can take place than a manual describing how to deliver a course.
Writing a manual would be a different task to writing a book – and of the two I felt that the book was more important. The reason for this is that the book could inform design in any organisation that aspires to work in a holistic and inclusive way with children and families that are in the Focus Group. (This is the term I use to refer to a very hurt and isolated section of society. This link is a summary, the full description is in Section Two, Setting The Scene).
Training, and therefore any manual, would be a natural follow on from that.
Also, while I had come across many books about all aspects of community, crime prevention, desistance [1] and related topics, I had not come across any that covered the topics that I intended to include.
Over the time that I was doing the writing using the internet became popular. As I am generally a bit behind everyone else it took me a while to realise that on-line can be far more interactive than a book, and a website would lean far more towards two-way knowledge flow – the very thing I’m trying to promote!
With a bit of encouragement from people more knowledgeable than myself, I decided I’d take a dip in the internet pool and see if I could stay afloat.
So, for better or
worse, that is what I decided!
[1]. Desistance, in probation/youth justice lingo, is a term that is used to describe the extent by which how young people resist the temptation to get involved in criminal behaviour.