We value flourishing
Enabling people to use, develop, and enjoy their capabilities over time and through life transitions.
We value mutuality
Nurturing connections that make people feel listened to, understood, and cared for – rather than invisible or ashamed.
We value meaning
Elevating meaning, purpose, and beauty to needs as important as food, shelter & safety.
We value whole-heartedness
Embracing that we don’t hold all the answers, and having the courage to ask critical questions and challenge long-held assumptions.
We value equality
Providing people most on the margins access to the resources required for flourishing, and seeing those resources as generative rather than scarce.
We believe social systems supporting these values would work more like trampolines and less like safety nets.
They would:
- Raise staid expectations and lowest common denominators.
- Increase people’s sense of agency and control.
- Remove stigma and embrace resilience.
- Meaningfully activate informal resources and relationships.
- Mirror a culture of risk-taking & growth versus risk aversion & stuckness.
Our theory of change
To get closer to there, we must shift behaviours of and relationships between leaders, managers, staff, end users, families, and community. Here’s what we seek to shape:
- Leaders and system players are actively listening, taking cues from the bottom-up, re-calibrating power, and modeling an inquiry led culture.
- Managers and leaders are embracing new ways of knowing and not knowing, have fresh ways to understand what is happening on-the-ground, and imagining what could be different.
- Staff and end users are redefining their roles, making joint decisions, and interacting in more reciprocal ways.
- End users and community members are actively swapping their talents, supporting one another, and doing less othering.
The question, of course, is how to shift these behaviours? Here we’re drawing on foundational change theory: Prochaska’s transtheoretical model of change. That’s a theory that says people cycle through five stages of change: precontemplation, contemplation, planning, action, and sustaining. The activities we do are designed to propel people and organizations from one stage to the next. Here’s how:
Download our Theory of Change in one page
To learn more, please visit: In With Forward
