Social Care Innovation Network - where does it go from here?

Featured article - 20 May 2019
By Martin Routledge from Social Care Future

Something is happening. Sixteen councils have signed up to do something significant. Seven Directors of Adults' Services and their teams spent the whole of a Friday in London alongside people using social care services as well as organisations driving person and community centred approaches to build “asset based areas”. 500 plus organisations and people have connected to the network so far.

• About the Social Care Innovation Network
• About the Social Care Future movement

So far so good - what next? For me it’s critical that the network stays true to the goals of the session at #socialcarefuture that helped focus its goals and methods. It must be about transformational not marginal change. The network, while linking and sharing with those 500 people and organisations, needs a laser focus on catalysing serious change. To do this it needs to catalyse and support four things:

• Tangible development of the detail of what an asset based area looks like - what Bob Hudson calls “the picture on the jigsaw box”, to make direction of travel really clear
• Building on “glimpses of the future”, focused local work on the key things that can inhibit or support major change towards the asset based area. This can be done via local systems that are part of the network
• These systems need to be co-producing with local people and innovators. They need to be helped by supportive methods such as the 100 day challenge approach and the learning pulled together by the network
• Link the network to the wider community focused on building a vision and driving towards major, not marginal, change including the #socialcarefuture movement
• Building a case for a transformation fund to take the learning from the network and using it to invest in the elements of the asset based area and the activity most likely to shift the system towards it.