The background
CUBE is a multi-agency family support community-based service in Barry, South Wales, UK.
They’re a team of specialists who’ve come together to make a difference for families living with or affected by mental health, suicide, grief and loss, domestic and family violence, and/or substance misuse.
Many people in the CUBE team have lived and living experiences of dealing with services, some have been supported in the past by other agencies, and some have accessed support from CUBE and then set up services within Barry to help others.
The CUBE had identified a group of families within their centre who could provide peer support and saw this as an alternative approach and complimentary service to their already established set of offers.
We were asked to train a multi disciplinary team (a combination of professional expertise and lived and living expertise) in best practices, patterns and principles that can support and inform the development of peer-to-peer response, so that CUBE could design their own peer response to support families in their context.
Our approach
The Cube Centre already has a strong commitment to elevating the voice of lived and living experience within their restorative approach, and an emphasis on increasing community capacity, which created a strong foundation for this work.
Recognising this expertise, TACSI took a staged training and coaching approach to help the team understand:
- How they could improve on service experience for families in the community
- How they can apply the peer-to-peer patterns, principles and approaches to compliment their vision and amplify lived experience as critical expertise in a specific response for their centre.
We ran three sessions with CUBE:
Session 1: The peer role
This session included an overview of service design, and how to find, train and onboard peers.
Session 2: The professional
We focused on creating good service experiences and service mapping, and explored how to show up as a professional, how to create peer profiles and tips for identifying your cohort.
Session 3: The connection
In this session, we focused on designing a connection between the peers (including what makes a good connection). We also explored patterns in connection, what peers can do together, and how to measure impact.
Throughout the sessions, we worked with both CUBE Centre staff and volunteers (who became peer workers in the model) to understand the bespoke responses and restorative practices of the Centre.
The goal was to co-design components to meet the needs of the families they work with and identify key interactions and processes to support a peer response, and inform the ongoing work and practice of The Cube Centre.
The outcomes
We supported the CUBE to create their own co-design methodology, practice tools, mindsets and practices through this bespoke peer-to-peer training and coaching.
We celebrate the Cube Centre whose original goal to create peer support for families has recently been launched with their whole family peer support program called Side by Side.
Toolkit: Foundational patterns for peer-to-peer responses
Throughout the project, we found we were readily drawing on patterns of success that have also been instrumental in other TACSI co-design responses, including Family by Family, Weavers, and Virtual Village .
We quickly realised that each of these initiatives drew on the same patterns of success.
We’ve documented these patterns in a toolkit, which we hope will help you create your own blueprint for peer-to-peer success.
This toolkit outlines seven essential foundations to ensure that co-design responses are built to last.
