Human Centered Approaches: Learning Journey
(2022-2023)
What if government programs, policies and services were actually human centered? This program supports government employees to learn about the impacts of the system on youth in care as well as offering collaborative solutions and practices to support a human centered approach. Designed and facilitated with the LET, this program inspired big ideas and shifts in perspective.
In partnership with DCS & Executive Council Office, the Let’s Care Collective offered a nine-month long learning journey on Human Centered Approaches and Collaborative practice. This experience invited change makers across departments to join in learning and working together to achieve the best outcomes for Nova Scotian Youth.
This journey is based on the models of Social Innovation Labs that have been practiced in Nova Scotia government and around the world. They are premised on the knowledge that our government is often not able to meet the needs of their youth because of breakdowns in relations, trust and knowledge sharing. These breakdowns exist both within government, (between departments and across hierarchies) and between government and communities.
This process addresses these issues by working collaboratively with participants from different sectors, skills and lived experience.
Participant Testimonials
“The facilitation is so on point it is seamless. so well organized, thought out and planned. Love the balance between the adult and lived experience team.”
“Transformational - I felt a lot of the reflective questions, and listening resonated for me professionally but also made me think about how I approach personal relationships and how we start to close those gaps to make professional personal. Loved the facilitation.”
“I remind myself to slow down, take a minute and connect with the people I'm interacting with - lean in with curiosity, ask questions and make space for listening.”
“It has created an avenue for new connections to be made. The ice-breakers and in-person sessions allowed us to actually meet people we never would have otherwise and establish rapport. In addition, these connections are stronger for our work because we were all in the same learning journey and so our level of information is relatively at the same level which made the experiments easier to work on together (as well as future work/collaboration opportunities). My team specifically wants to keep connected beyond this project which is a good sign of how this journey has impacted us. Ultimately, the strong silos in government can be slowly shaken up by opportunities like this.”
“Overall, I can strongly articulate my learnings from this journey because the facilitation was informative and engaging. The facilitation was done with a lot of head-heart-hands. Sharing vulnerable and respectfully, seeing the full humanity of people while coming together to think of solutions and then getting to work on our experiments and apply what we had learnt and test our ideas.”