Recently, I had the great pleasure of speaking in my home town about some of my work with the IFF. The learning disability forum of NHS Ayrshire and Arran had asked me to come and speak about the fifth wave at one of their regular events.
The fifth wave, written in 2003 and available on the IFF website to download, explores the history of public heath from an iff perspective, identifies four waves of intervention over the past 250 years and asks what’s coming next.
Also speaking in the programme were members of the V.I.P. partnership, a new social enterprise charity which aims to empower citizen leaders in the field of learning disability, encourage active citizenship among V.I.P. members and engage with community partners and create a networks of all those whose lives touch those with learning disabilities.
Their presentation was lively and thought provoking and included a game with a giant balloon involving the whole audience!
I was astonished when the presentation began by saying that the fifth wave and other IFF ideas had inspired them to take the path they were now on. They had spent a couple of years trying to establish something different without success. On reflecting why this was so, they concluded that while they said they were trying to do something different, the processes which they were using really did not lend themselves to this aspiration. Plans setting out objectives, targets and predetermined outcomes did not inspire, engage or encourage people to stay around for long.
The next slide they flashed up in ther presentation was an IFF prompt, see direction as a result of process, complete with ladybird illustartion too, just like the original. The organisers had heard a fifth wave presentation and reconsidered their strategy in the lght of these ideas. Open aims (above), no pedetermined plan, citizens with learning disabilities at the heart of governance and as ambassadors, speaking and acting on their own behalf. They haven’t looked back since and launch as a charitable social enterprise on 29th April. If the energy of their presentation is anythign to go by, it will be tremendous and lifeenhancing fun with serious results.
In speaking with them afterwards, it also transpired that they have adopted the firefly metaphor developed for the India scenarios developed by IFF members Arun Maira and Rajiv Kumar for the World Economic Forum in 2006 and discussed at IFF 7 ( report available on the IFF website). My own presentation was fine, but on the way home what stayed in my mind, was the excited sense of fulfilment and surprise that some of our ideas had been helpful in developing a rather wonderful public good.
For example four prompts and their interpretations were played one after the other: