By Will Horwitz
Today at our Chain Reaction event the Council on Social Action will be launching three new papers.* You can follow Chain Reaction live on this page, and even watch the launch of these papers, with vice-chair David Robinson at 11.30am.
The first two look at just how important human relationships are in society. A mentoring scheme for ex-offenders, a friendly advisor at the Jobcentre, or a caring and concerned nurse at the hospital, can all make a difficult experience much easier. Ultimately, they can transform society.
That seems like a bold claim, and one that makes a lot of sense when you think about. But the first of our reports Time Well Spent goes further and provides some evidence that it’s worth investing in. The research looks at legal aid, and the relationship between advisor and client. It shows that not only is a good relationship very important to both, but it actually leads to a better outcome. It’s evidence for something we’ve said before – that public services should be ‘humanised’, they should have individual relationships at their heart.
Meanwhile the second report People of Influence describes the whole range of CoSA’s work on the importance of one-to-one relationships. It looks at the 44 recommendations CoSA made over a year ago, and shows that 20 have made significant progress or been fulfilled. Some fascinating progress has been made, it’s well worth a read.
And finally, Means and Ends looks back over the last two years of CoSA’s work, highlighting the many successes. You’ll be hearing more about this in the next month or two, but for now do take a look, and follow all that’s happening at Chain Reaction today.
* Community Links operates a bewildering array of brands, so it might be a good time to say that we organise Chain Reaction, and we coordinate the
Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action, with our co-founder David Robinson as vice-chair.
[...] Immediately some recent reports sprung to mind Working Alongside, produced with ADT and both People of Influence and Time Well Spent from the Council on Social Action. I emailed Jim Knight’s private office about the [...]