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Good ideas seems to always come in the 11th hour. On Monday, we went to the bookstore, toy store, and zoo looking for inspiration to help us create family-facing materials. On Tuesday, we mocked up some early measurement tools, service propositions, and branding. On Wednesday, we refined those ideas. On Thursday, we made physical models of these things and crowded around the table to play our new time game and family personality test. Now, on Friday, we've decided we didn't get things quite right on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Tomorrow, on Saturday, we'll start sharing and further developing our ideas with families in their homes. So that leaves the next 12 hours to actualise some of our revised thinking (Well, really, that leaves the next 12 hours for Chris to visualise our revised thinking!)
Three weeks ago we ran a family festival for 100 families. Two weeks ago we finished up our family dinners and ethnographies with a trip to Port Augusta. Over the last week, we've been trying to make sense 'family thriving' and identifying opportunities areas with our ethnographers and sounding board. Phew!
"I learned something new about my children today," a mom commented as she left the Family Festival, with three kids, three kites, and three wind chimes in tow. That felt good to hear. We put on the family festival to create the conditions for families to discover, learn, and have fun, together. The 100 or so families that came out to the Rajah Street Reserve last Sunday certainly seemed to have fun, many trying out a flat white or a professional massage for the first time. Yet not all families learned and had fun, together, as a whole unit. At times, kids were sent off to learn from Allan, the cartoonist, or Matt, the sound guy, while parents hung out at the cafe and supervised from the periphery.
Some weeks, you put the intellectual part of your brain to use. Other weeks, you put the practical part of your brain to use. This week was all about the practical: organising a free family festival this Sunday from 12-3pm in the Rajah Street Reserve, Marion.
It was all about honey chicken this week. We sat around dinning room tables, kitchen tables, and perched in front rooms, laughing, sharing, talking, and eating a lot of Chinese food.
I have now officially been working at TACSI, on the Family Project, for one week! It’s been an amazing week of discovery and finding new ways to look at the world. My last 8 years have been spent working with and supporting families through assessment and applying social work theory, models and frameworks to what my staff or I observed. We drew our own conclusions from our observations and then moved in a direction or connected the family with the best fit. Whilst I have always been a firm believer in transparency and honest mutual respect with families, I can see now that there is still so much more room for growth. The past families I have worked with have been extremely complex with traumatic histories and long standing relationships with agencies such as Families SA, Housing SA and Centrelink.
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