Last week we began working with the Single Homeless Project, supporting people with experience of homelessness and addiction. Our aim was to tackle this problem: How do we support people who’ve experienced these issues to be heard by decision-makers? And how do we encourage politicians to use the web to take part in these discussions?
This is why we’re helping to run some fringe Party Conference events this year with FutureGov and OPM. We’ll be in Birmingham this Sunday talking to Liberal Democrats about ways they can use the web better to engage with communities. We’ll be in Liverpool on the 28th September and in Manchester on the 2nd October for the Labour and Conservative fringe events.
At the Single Homeless Project we discovered that this group desperately wanted to be understood and listened-to by councillors. And they should be part of debate that affects how the rest of society views them! Decisions are often made based on the opinions of people without first-hand experience of issues like crime and addiction and at SHP we found an eager group of people ready to throw their voices into the ring to shed some light on the reality of their lives.
Unheard Holler, a fledgling blog, was one of the outcomes of the first week.
If you’d like to get a flavour of what we’ll be doing at the fringe events (or come to them for that matter!), here’s a lovely short film (featuring moi) about what we’re up to:
Local | Social | Digital from FutureGov on Vimeo.
