A message from Bob Rhodes of Lives Through Friends:
Coordinated and animated by LivesthroughFriends – with lots of help from Vanguard Thinking Wales and the Co-production movement – the Strengths-based Practice Study Group has been meeting three or four times a year since 2011. It’s always been a free coming together of leaders, thinkers, practitioners, managers and citizens who want to share the progress they are making or seek help in their struggles to put people, relationships, and communities back at the centre of how we we care for each other – recognising that there is much more to life than services and the necessity to leaven our society’s growing dependence on the myth that ‘care’ can be bought with a healthy reintroduction of community and social work.

Topics for this session:

• Better Future Lives in Gwent – Coproducing Change with Jim Wright
• The risks of NOT enabling people to have a natural support network with Mark John-Williams
• Making Health & Social Services Integration a sustainable benefit with Dr Owen Jones
• Social Prescribing – Signposting or Community Work? with Simon James
• Community and Society – Coproduce or Co-opt? The Leadership challenge with Bob Rhodes