Modern lives are full of connections, but all too often, young people and practitioners are telling us they experience a profound sense of disconnection.  

They are telling us they sometimes feel anxious, lonely, hopeless and frustrated. We think these might be quite normal emotional responses to a world that sometimes lacks spaces for meaningful connection.     

Communication is everywhere and all around us in a constant flow of digital messages, images, advertising, and streaming video, coming toward us faster and faster.  

At Resonant Collaboration, we understand that everyday life for young people, families and practitioners alike can be a little overwhelming, so we pay attention to pace and planning. We work carefully, creatively and – of course – collaboratively.   

Our belief is that when collaboration is convened with love, it holds the potential to shift practice situations that may otherwise stay stuck…  

When is the last time you had the pleasure of taking the time, while participating in a workshop, to get to know a practitioner from a different sector or discipline to your own? When is the last time you had a good chat with a care worker, housing officer, psycho-therapist, police officer, teacher, social worker, or youth worker?  

What did you learn? What is their job like these days? 

At Resonant Collaboration, we create spaces devoted to listening to one another, bearing witness to the moments of progress and recognition, and being open to the everyday struggles of our real practice.  

We think Resonant Collaboration happens when our relationships with each other – and the different worlds of our work roles – begin to chime with shared experience. There is a sense of connection and curiosity, while staying with the challenges and constraints we face in everyday practice, as public service professionals and volunteers, across levels of power, discipline and sector. 

We actively seek to bring together professionals from different backgrounds, to create conducive conditionsfor learning conversations, and to forge relationships that can endure across the boundaries of teams, services, organisations, and sectors.  

You know those training sessions with ten objectives in two hours? Each presentation slide is filled with so… many… words! A participant-without-a-face triple-checks the slide pack will be circulated afterwards. Questions are rapidly asked and answered. And there is yearning – and sometimes yawning – in the room, for  

• a thorough sounding-out of practice…  

• a testing of connections…  

• an exploration of the ah-ha moments… 

• a kicking around of ideas…  

• a deeper dig into the thorny patch of problems... 

…but there isn’t enough time.  

So, at Resonant Collaboration, we don’t do training. We believe that powerful learning, reflection and change are enabled through shared experience.  

We don’t deliver to you. We collaborate and learn with you.  

Too many children, young people, families and communities face adversity and harm.  Some of our current ‘safeguarding’ approaches can actively contribute to this harm, particularly for those who experience marginalisation and discrimination, such as young people of colour, LGBTQIA+ youth, those experiencing poverty and those with special education needs and disabilities.  

When we get alongside practitioners across voluntary, public and private sector settings, they tell us they want to build knowledge, deepen understanding and grow confidence in responding ethically to the realities and consequences of these harms. The harms that practitioners and the people they work with worry about include structural inequalities, racism, poverty, violence, exploitation and radicalisation.  

Part of the problem we face together is that when we label a child, young person, family, community or group as ‘risky’ or ‘at risk,’ we suggest that human or group is the root cause of the harm in their lives. This approach places the blame within the person, family or group, which can obscure the inequality, adversity, locations, and online spaces that may be laying behind the apparent ‘risk’ as the root causes of harm.    

Practitioners and managers tell us they want the permission to imagine different ways of collaborating with young people, families and communities. They yearn for positive practice without stigma, control, surveillance, exclusion, and criminalisation.   

At Resonant Collaboration, we believe that promoting welfare and creating safety with children, young people and families means examining how norms, interventions, institutions, and structures can sometimes contribute to harm and de-humanisation.  

We deliberately re-humanise practice, management, leadership, research, and policymaking. This demands that we…  

• seek to develop emotional and structural awareness, collectively and as individuals,  

• listen to, challenge and support each other, in solidarity,  

• stay with discomfort of facing realities of racism and structural discrimination, and     

• commit to continuous learning about structural and institutional causes of harm.  

In our facilitation, consultation and research projects, we pay close attention to the dynamics of power and privilege, which may serve to worsen the effects of stigma, stereotype, and discrimination, and may also produce social inequalities. 

Learning and change in settings, services and local places is only sustained when we share the evidence of the difference we are making together. Through our experience of consultation, facilitation and action research with local places, we have found that when practitioners receive high-quality space and time for collaborative learning, we can move together into reflection, sense-making, planning and social action.  

Our research, policy and influencing work always begins with the local knowledge, practice wisdom, and the evidence already present in communities and organisations. We seek to stimulate opportunities for local practice wisdom to influence policy and strategy at the levels of region, sector and nation.  

Our Resonant Collaborators have tonnes of experience in supporting practitioners who work in non-statutory services, like community groups, primary care, schools, and youth clubs. Likewise, we are experienced in working within and alongside statutory services, such as children’s social work, policing, youth justice and healthcare.   

So, at Resonant Collaboration, we keep it real.  

We know what it’s like to work every day with young people, families, communities, and volunteers, offering them advice, help, support. We know what it’s like to try – and occasionally succeed – to intervene in the structural and social factors that cause harm and prevent flourishing.