FLiP participated at a one-day Express Social Innovation Camp (Sicamp) focused on young people and health- on Saturday 25th of February 2012. The event was a delivered in partnership with NECLES HIEC (Health Innovation Education Cluster), a dynamic network of Health Educators, Innovators and those that ensure health care is delivered to the population of London and Essex.

Interesting and clever young people, designers, developers, and healthcare experts were teamed up in groups to work on five questions:
1. How can we help make the transition to adulthood work more smoothly?
2. How can we help those with health and wellbeing issues avoid/reduce the impact of social isolation?
3. How can users better use their own medical history to have a smoother health care experience?
4. How can young people make a game out of eating well and getting fit?
5. How do I know if I need to see the doctor, and can we make it a better experience?

Young people have particular health needs – both preventative and in dealing with the healthcare system—which aren’t well catered to – the healthcare system is designed for adults and children, and when going through the transition from one to the other, the opportunity for confusion and problems arise.

Itamar Ferrer, co-founder of FLiP, joined the the first team to work on making the transition to adulthood work more smoothly. The team’s clear outcome was the insight that while there are loads of good services, young people don’t know where or what those services are. Our task was to address the transition a young person needs to make to access these services.  We focussed on signposting services for 12-16 year olds in a variety of ways that would allow them to make their own route towards health. We think that much of our insight will be taken on board with the myhealthlondon website.

We were kindly allowed to present FLIP at a meeting of the Connexions Personal Advisors (PA) team in Camden today. We were keen to see if the connexions service would be able to refer young people onto the tool and if they would find it useful.

The PAs had some questions on what type of opportunities would be listed on the site. They support excluded young people not in employment education or training (NEET) and often the opportunities that are out there are still out of the reach of many young people NEET because of the qualification requirements.

This has got us thinking about what other entry level qualifications and opportunities, in addition to apprenticeships, that we can put up on the site.

Watch this space!

FLiP showreel from Flip Jobs on Vimeo.

Check out the site at www.flipyourself.co.uk

Whilst we build the tool, FLiP is looking at the best way to engage with the different and varied audiences we are speaking to. We ran a session with Creative Business Branding & Communications designer Richie Manu. Richie is a leading Creative Mentor, Design Practitioner and University Lecturer. He also founded Consurgo, a social enterprise that provides career support to creative graduates.

The prime objective of the session was to develop a text or descriptive that is best used to communicate what FLIP is in the most direct and concise way. In addition, as part of the overall communication the definition of the FLIP channels of communication were identified to suit the various groups FLiP speaks to. Thsi session opened a process of branding that we will develop post-pilot stage. However we are putting the stepping stones in place to be ready to roll it out!

NESTA has brought on board a Learning Partner to help draw out the learning from the Reboot Britain Programme. They have laid out a series of workshops and we have participated in the first this month. This workshop was focused on getting the project’s inputs into the learning work, particularly around the Enquiry Framework and the individual case studies to be produced. It was a good opportunity to make both the process and the outputs mutually useful for NESTA as well as for the individual projects. Some of the key things that were discussed covered the goals for the project (short term and longer term impact), definitions of project success,  the building blocks and how they fit together to achieve goals, the specific role of collaborative technology in achieving these goals as well as the lessons so far.

We had a good session that allowed the teams from the different projects share their experiences in terms of what has been easier or harder than expected. The learning partners will meet the individual projects. FLiP, Camden Apprenticeship Programme and NESTA learning partner will hold a 2 hour workshop to dig deep into the learning by focusing on our journey, what as worked, where things have been challenging and what we have achieved already. We’re looking forward to it!

The contacts from our call out to engage with employers are popping up. We had the opportunity to meet with CF Moller Architects, one of Scandinavia’s oldest and largest architectural practices. However CF Moller Architects in London is comprised of a small team but they are keen on providing opportunities to young people to acquire experience in the architectural sector. We picked up on their enthusiasm and went to see them to understand what information is relevant to them as employers offering opportunities to young people. In addition we asked about the relevance and quality of information to be able to identify the format for the FLiP appraisal method and profiles.

This interview is part of the FLiP process to identify opportunities that match companies or organisations providing job work experience with young people with a young person’s FLiP profile. We found out that CF Moller had clear idea of what they could offer a young person with no specialised skills base or much previous experience. However they think that young people should be able to pull together a positive profile and reference and this is where FLiP can be very helpful by getting many people supporting a young persons skills and character.  “Anyone looking for a job could put something positive together. There is an incentive for us to get it right – hire the right person because the consequences of the opposite are too big for the small company to carry. The wrong young person in the job is someone who is unwilling to do work or learn, dishonest, sour attitude and obstinate.”

We lok forward to hearing from the next employers we are setting up meetings with and are excited to see the  potential of the tool to also help employers as well as observing the initiative of such employers to give young people opportunities!

With NESTA’s support, FLiP hosted a roundtable discussion with stakeholders from the education, employment and public services sectors with the aim to get a better understanding of how they value of young people’s skills.

Throughout a series of activities, the discussion involved current youth unemployment,  what young people consider to be their existing skills, how they are communicated and how those skills are valued by employers and support services. We also discussed what are the resources available for a young person in search of employment. A very important part of the discussion was dedicated to speak about additional resources that might help and present the potential of FLiP as one of these resources.

It was a successful discussion that gave us a greater insight to the different positions from the stakeholders involved in the FLiP service, as well as many suggestions to be considered and possibly implemented. We learned about the current situation in schools and their changing context as well as the power & weight of ‘reputation capital’ within young people.

We confirmed our assumptions about the importance of the value of transferable skills for employers. They want to have a better insight into who the young person is and what they could be good at.

FLiP is keen about engaging more young people from different areas that might need help in connecting to employment. We are constantly working on how to make FLiP better and include young people and different stakeholders in the co-design and decision making process of the tool.

The FLiP team had the opportunity to speak with  Surrey County Council and their RAiS Team (Raising Achievement in Surrey) from the Youth Development department. They welcomed us to the Karibu Community Home where we had the opportunity to meet a group of young people in Surrey.

We wanted to understand more about the context of work opportunities from their perspective and present FLiP as a tool to support them. On the day young people got to interact with a prototype on the day. We took a completely different approach to this and did a paper based prototype for them to use and give us feedback as well as help shape the tool better to fit their needs. We asked the young people to give us their first impressions of the home page, to test different appraisal methods to create a profile and do some network mapping.
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