Life Project – Learning To Innovate With Families
New ways to support challenged families
LIFE is a project that aims to change the way professionals work with vulnerable families.
Its goal is to develop new skills, competencies, training products & methodologies to enable social workers and other professionals to innovate and adopt more effective interventions in working with families experiencing multiple and complex difficulties.
LIFE is financed by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
Methodology
LIFE aims to create sinergies beetween the main stakeholders involved, in order to co-create innovative solutions that can help professionals, families and public authorites to face in a new way the problems that affect mullti challenged families.
Partners
Partners come from five different countries: Sweden, Norway, Slovenia, Portugal and Italy. They meet regularly in order to discuss the project development, check the results and define the next steps to take.
Social Workers
Professionals are the main target of the project. Since they work on the field on a daily basis, they are the ones that better know the issues that have to be addressed. Moreover, they are the ones that can better apply and value the efficacy of the innovative instruments developed by the project.
Families
This project intends also to give to the families the instruments to find a new way to face their issues, in order to make them able to contribute in solving their problem in an proactive way.
Intellectual Outputs
The project develops in order to realize four main intellectual outputs, that can be proved useful to measure the results of the project and that can be eventually disseminated in order to amplify the project’s results.
#1 Competency Framework
It describes the core competencies required by social workers and related professionals working with vulnerable families.
#2 Knowledge Triangle
It is a learning model based on an abductive learning approach which seeks to promote links between practice knowledge, research based knowledge, education and training as well as a more holistic, flexible approach which also incorporates the perceptions of the service users.
#3 Innovation Skills Development Programme
It is underpinned by the above products and includes a full curriculum and supporting learning materials focusing on the practice based innovative skills, knowledge and competencies required to support innovation in work with vulnerable families.
#4 Innovation Toolkit
It includes details of the above products as well as guidance for practitioners and their employers on the implications of issues involved in working on innovatory approaches within multi disciplinary partnerships in work with vulnerable families.