From Aberdeen City to West Sussex, Northumberland to South Eastern Trust, the Mind Of My Own community stretches to all corners of the UK. This post will detail four examples of how our apps are being used in the North, South, East, and West of the nation.
North – Aberdeen City
Winners of the ‘Swiftest Implementation’ award at VoxCon 2019, Aberdeen City have received over 170 statements from young people in under three months. They already have so much data they’re starting to look at how they can improve their practice based on what children and young people are telling them via Mind Of My Own apps.
How have they managed this? They have strong senior leadership on their implementation team coupled with a brilliant training plan. This means that every member of staff not only must attend a training session, but they are also held accountable to use the apps with the children and young people they work with.
South – West Sussex
Anyone who attended VoxCon 2019 and heard Caz Henry-Evans speak on the work she is doing in West Sussex will have seen the passion their organisation has for hearing children’s voices. Caz has been integral in ensuring Mind Of My Own is used by staff across their services.
Among many other things, she has created a library of innovative resources aimed at encouraging young people to sign up and use the One App on their own. These even include a QR code that links directly to the One app website, like this leaflet. The West Sussex Children in Care Council have also helped encourage young people to use Mind Of My Own is by making this brilliant video promoting the use of our apps.
To make sure workers are also using their accounts well, West Sussex have ensured that all team managers ask their staff about how often they’ve used Mind Of My Own in all supervisions and team meetings. This is then fed directly back to Caz in her quarterly report to senior management team meetings.
East – Northumberland
The East coast authority of Northumberland has been using Mind Of My Own apps since 2015. In that time they’ve received hundreds of views, wishes and feelings directly from their young people who are preparing for upcoming reviews, meetings and statutory visits. They’ve now started to take their implementation to the next level by looking at the data they’ve collected from statements.
Ben Sanderson, Northumberland’s project lead, ran a workshop this year at VoxCon with Mind Of My Own Director, Yvonne Anderson. Their workshop, Evaluating Mind Of My Own, looked at how data obtained through the apps can be used and evaluated to inform strategic service-delivery decisions and inspections.
West – South Eastern Trust (Northern Ireland)
South Eastern Trust was one of the very first organisations using Mind Of My Own apps. Since joining the community in 2014, the apps have been embedded within the long term looked after team and rolled out to wider teams from there. By focusing their implementation on one team they’ve built a strong value proposition and foundation of case studies that is now being spread across wider services.
The trust has a strong strategic lead on the project, David Hamilton, who has been involved in the implementation from the very beginning. We still use South Eastern Trust as a case study dating back to when they first reported a 99% take-up of Mind Of My Own when offered to their children and young people.
As of June 2019, our apps have been implemented in over 75 organisations. The four examples above are from the four corners of the UK and we’re proud to work with so many other local authorities in between. Who knows, perhaps by June 2020 we’ll be writing about the organisations using our apps to hear children’s voices from four corners of the world!
