Human Rights Support Solutions 2023: Our Impact
The Baring Foundation have generously funded BIHR’s Community Programme for three years, from 2022 to 2025. The project is to deliver on BIHR’s aim to strengthen the agency and voice of community and voluntary groups to address social justice issues using human rights.
The programme has six different phases, that will repeat annually in what we are calling a “project cycle”. Stage three of this project cycle is delivery of our Awareness-Raising Workshops.
This stage of the project cycle is about partnering with community groups. This is an application-based programme where we partner with community groups to co-design a bespoke human rights support solution
The aim of the human rights support solutions is to develop partnerships with community groups in order to support longer-term social change through human rights advocacy and approaches. During this phase of the programme, we were able to work with six community groups to co-design human rights support solutions to integrate HRA advocacy into their ongoing work to tackle a specific issue or area relevant to their organisation.
Who did we work with?
BIHR worked with 6 organisations...
ATD Fourth World is a family support programme for the most vulnerable and excluded families. With time, space, and resources, they build upon their strengths, develop their support networks, and can access public services in their community. Through their advocacy work with families in crisis, they foster conditions that allow parents, children, and professionals to better understand one another and collaborate.
Together with All Together in Dignity Forth World UK, we have produced a resource for young people to understand their human rights and how to use them, with a specific focus on young people in poverty.
My Life My Choice is a self-advocacy organisation for adults with a learning disability. Their vision is a world where people with a learning disability are treated without prejudice and can have choice and control over their own lives.
Together with My Life, My Choice, we have produced an accessible resource for people with learning disabilities who have been placed in long stay hospitals either unnecessarily or for too long. It aimed to inform them about what rights they have and how to use them to challenge their stay.
Families in Trauma and Recovery was set up by a husband-and-wife team who found themselves dealing with a traumatic family situation, but with little experience of how to handle it, and without knowing where to turn for support. They offer a range of services to the public including Trauma informed Peer to Peer and Emotional CPR and focus on recovery in contrast to traditional approaches.
Together with Families in Trauma and Recovery, we have produced a resource for families, including parents and children, that have experienced trauma and are trying to navigate the system to receive care and support using the language of human rights.
Fair Justice System for Scotland is a grassroots-focused organisation that advocates for justice sector reforms that create more racial diversity and inclusion in the Scottish justice system.
Together with Fair Just System for Scotland, we produced a resource for people struggling with access to services in Scotland largely failing the Black African community. The resource aims to provide practical examples of human rights breaches and how to use frameworks to make sure rights are respected.
All Wales People First is the united voice of self-advocacy groups and people with learning disabilities in Wales. They want to ensure that people with learning disabilities in Wales, can have access to self-advocacy support so that they are able to voice choice and control.
They also want to ensure that people with learning disabilities understand their rights, especially their Human Rights.
Together with All Wales People first, we produced an accessible resource that tells people with learning disabilities about their human rights and how to use them so that they can advocate for themselves and others.
The Migrants’ Rights Network is a UK charity that stands in solidarity with all migrants in their fights for rights and justice. We co-curate campaigns using anti-oppression practices to create transformational change, extending beyond the individual impact on migrants’ lives, to tackle oppression at its source.
Together with Migrants’ Rights Network, produced a practical guide on human rights that is geared towards asylum seekers in accommodation who can sometimes have their rights neglected whilst in these situations.
The co-design process
The co-design communities programme covered four ‘phases’ which took the programme from its beginning to end. Each stage involved BIHR creating and facilitating the programme from an initial free ‘discovery’ workshop where we invited community groups from across the UK to learn about the Human Rights Act and how it could be beneficial to them, and then a bit about the co-design programme itself.
The four phases of the programme are as follows:
Discover
The ‘discover’ phase involved inviting community and voluntary groups from around the UK to attend a free, online workshop that introduced the Human Rights Act and gave information about the co-design programme. We then invited those community groups to apply for the programme.
Define
The ‘define phase of the co-design programme involved inviting the six selected community groups to a workshop where we explained more about the co-design programme and did some mapping using Slido and breakout rooms to figure out what issues each community group has and how they would like to use a human rights resource to address this issue.
Develop
The develop phase of the co-design programme is where we worked with the six community groups to map, develop, and test their human rights support solutions.
Deliver
By the end of the co-design programme, we had created six human rights support solutions, one for each of the community groups. We published the resources on our website, and each day of the launch week we spotlighted a different resource so that we could have a big focus on each resource and get as much traction for them as possible.
You said we did
A key part of the co-design process was making sure that the voices and needs of the community groups formed the backbone of the support solutions. Here are some examples of putting the community suggestions into practice:
“Members would prefer stories from Wales but do feel it is necessary for the stories to be true. They wondered if elements of the stories could be changed to make it more Welsh. They would also like to see examples that focus more on what the person did themselves, including deciding to enlist the help of an advocate.”
We collaborated with All Wales People First to use real stories from within their organisation for the resources. This meant that their voices and experiences would be used throughout the resource, and this made them more relevant. The stories also meant we could focus the stories more on self-advocacy.
“Our audience should be young people BUT if we make it accessible for young people, it will be accessible for everyone. Meanwhile, if it’s done the other way around, and targeted to professionals or older people, the language and design won’t be accessible for young people.”
We took this feedback and changed the language of the resource to make it more appealing to a wider audience. We also included more visual elements so that the resource was easier to read. Additionally, we added QR codes that link to Easy Read versions of some of the sections.
“Some of the information we could use links to other guides rather than explain - for example I am sure there are Easy Read guides to the Human Rights Act out there? Are there videos or picture examples in your archive that we could link to rather than written text?”
We loved the idea of having video versions of the content to make the resource more accessible and easier to digest. Therefore, we created a video version of the entire resource, with audio versions of the content, and linked to these in the resource with a QR code.
“Our logo and background was based on Kintsugi – the ancient Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery as it had been so valuable. So rather than throw it away, the broken pieces were mended with gold – to make it more beautiful and to celebrate the cracks. So often the new vessel was worth more than the old one due to the repairs in gold.”
We loved this philosophy that Families and Trauma takes towards Kintsugi, so we took this and used it in the design elements of the resource.
We used gold coloured cracks to make the background of
the resource across all the pages so this philosophy could be present throughout.
Our Community Support Solutions in 2023
We're pleased to share the human rights solutions co-produced with our community partners in 2023. Click each of the front covers below to see the resources.
What's next?
We're currently working with four organisations to create human rights support solutions that will be ready to share in December 2024. Find out more on our main programme page.
We are looking forward to working with more community groups to produce further bespoke human rights support solutions for their organisations.
If you are interested in the next support solution programme, you can sign up to our communities mailing list to be updated when the programme begins.