What is the End of Life Impact Network?
The concept at the heart of the End of Life Impact Network is to connect people and support them to create change in new and different ways. Practically speaking, this looks like:
Strengthening interconnectedness and alignment
Seeing and acting with the wisdom of many perspectives
Organising in ways that don’t reinforce business-as-usual
Working with conflicting views in generative ways.
These network activities create trusting relationships, fertile soil for new ideas, opportunities for independent and collaborative action and a legitimate platform to influence broader change.
Why the End of Life Impact Network?
Often considered morbid or taboo, death and dying are not popular topics. As a society, Australia sweeps conversations about death under the rug, leading to a raft of unfortunate, often preventable, experiences for people and their loved ones at the end of their lives.
The definition and measurement of what a good outcomes means at the end of life is not agreed across the health system. Across the stakeholders we’ve been on this journey alongside, we’ve heard that a good outcome in death and dying comprises the following key elements:
Change-makers with a focus on death and dying from across Australia have been contributing their resources, knowledge and passion to this impact network for over three years, and now with the continuing support of The Wicking Trust, their important vision for change is supported until 2027.
How the network works
The End of Life Impact Network connects the existing work and activities of change makers and innovators in the EoL system, and produces ideas and projects to test and learn about what creates systems impact.
We do that by:
Building relationships and trust between previously siloed areas of the EoL system
Aligning around shared mission and purpose
Mapping the system from where each member stands and identifying leverage points to shift conditions that perpetuate problems.
Lifting out of business as usual to see the bigger picture
Creating partnerships that lead to action
Measuring the efficacy of Impact Network practices as an approach for creating systems change
This initiative was our first exploration of the Impact Network approach as an enabler of systems change, and has now been adopted as a key enabler in our broader strategy.
Networks and systems are one and the same thing: collections of formal and informal relationships that produce intended and unintended outcomes.
The rationale behind the network approach to systems change is that a dynamic moving system, full of emergence, needs a dynamic moving ecosystem of independent (therefore supporting a diversity of needs) but aligned responders working to create a holistic set of benefits.
What we’ve learnt
Our original aim was to seed a national collaboration for systems level impact in end of life care and services, and to build coalitions of stakeholders with the capability to create shifts in parts of the system.
What we’ve observed, achieved and learned in our four years of convening has influenced the formation of four additional networks in TACSI’s portfolio of systems change work. We've seen networked ways of working together adopted as fundamental ways of operating at TACSI, both as an organisation and in our interactions with our partners at all levels.Insert text here
Our impact (so far)
Alignment with members on death literacy focus, while building systems impact and social innovation capabilities
40+ members at all levels from core to periphery
Collective systems mapping to identify leverage points
Creation of an ideas portfolio to accelerate learning, connection and adaptation
Six active hubs (working groups that emerge focused on the jobs to be done) have formed:
Knowing / doing gap
End of life game
Brand hub
Network learning hub (cross network — joining up members between TACSI’s networks and beyond)
Network sustainability hub
Network Evaluation
Innovation fund established to support prototypes with participatory decision-making and granting
Five end of life conversation starter game prototypes developed and tested by the network
Game publisher and distributor partnership formed
Active collaboration between network members and their own initiatives (a number of examples if required)
Co-designed network strategy for 2022 and beyond
Five years further investment from The Wicking Trust, building on a three year initial investment
Our commitment to First Nations First
Through our regular network convenings, we’re building a culture of deep and individualised Acknowledgement of Country. We pay respect to the traditional owners of all of the lands upon which we meet through sharing stories, language and personal reflections.
We understand the cultural significance of the cycles of Life and Death across all cultures that are woven into our stories, our lives and rituals around death and dying, grief and loss. We respect the wisdom of our First Nations Peoples and their cultural ways of knowing and being.
There is a significant commitment across Network members to develop Reconciliation Actions within their own organisations and sphere of influence.