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Community work

Co-Design a Human Rights Solution with BIHR

In 2021-22, we ran a pilot programme where we worked with different communities to come up with a human rights solution to an issue they face everyday. Together with four partner organisations from different sectors and locations across the UK, we created four final resources which are available below. Following the success of the pilot, we then worked with six partner organisations in 2023.

How we made the solutions

In 2021, BIHR began a new approach to working with communities with the launch of the  "Co-design a human rights support “solution” with BIHR" programme.

This programme seeks to support community groups and voluntary groups to find human rights “solutions” to problems or issues they face. We worked with a small number of partners as a pilot project and are now developing our long-term offer to community groups. Our support is intended to enable groups to address the day-to-day issues where rights are risked, creating positive change within imperfect systems.

Co-design is at the core of this project. Our approach to co-design used a four-stage process to ensure that the views and opinions of our partners and the eventual end “users” of the solution were central to the development.

Stage 1: Discover

We hosted a workshop with community, campaigning and advocacy organisations across the UK who were interested in working with BIHR longer-term to support their human rights advocacy.

This was session was so valuable for BIHR as a human rights charity, and feedback told us the attendees also found it very helpful to have these conversations and build relationships.

Following the workshop, we received many applications from fantastic organisations who wanted to work with us on pilot projects. We used criteria to score each application and choose the top-scoring organisations to partner with.

Stage 2: Define 

These partners were then invited to a "Define" workshop to further define their ideas for human rights support "solutions".

Each organisation then worked with a staff member to co-develop plans so that we could start work mapping, developing and testing the solutions.

Stage 3: Develop

We then worked with the partner organisations to map, develop and test their human rights "solutions".

Stage 4: Deliver

The final step was to publish and share the finished tools!

The impact of these solutions

See below our impact reports from our pilot project:

Want to find out more about our co-design project for working with community groups? Contact the project lead, Carlyn Miller on cmiller@bihr.org.uk.

Our partners

Everyone at BIHR would like to say a massive thank you to our core funders, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Tudor Trust, the Bromley Trust for making it possible for us to explore our work with communities and co-design support solutions that mean we can all make change through human rights, together. 

And thank you to our four partner organisations!

The future of these solutions

Following the success of our pilot programme, we're pleased to be able to continuing our work with communities through our 2022 - 2025 programme, kindly funded by the Baring Foundation.

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