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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 four of this project cycle is the developing of Community Support Solutions. 

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...

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: 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to mention how amazing the resource looks like and how happy we are with it! The girls are very proud of it.

ATD Fourth World Member

This resource is incredibly valuable for our Know Your Rights campaign and also to the entire charity sector working with migrants including asylum seekers and refugees.

Ernest Ulaya, Ambassador and Advisor at the Migrants’ Rights Network

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity the BIHR has given us to work in collaboration with the young people and with the BIHR to create an essential tool for young people. As a team, we felt listened to in every step of the resource production and are incredibly proud of the outcome. It has been a great pleasure to work with their team.

Member of ATD UK

Now that we’ve got this Easy Read document people will know their rights without having to worry about knowing the jargon and long words.

Member of My Life My Choice

We will be using this at every event we have, we will also be using it with our service users and will also be distributing this to all the local services we work alongside. We will also be promoting this on social media too.

Participant in the support solution programme

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. 

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