Ways we can help you
With each small team of local people working together with professionals, we aim to create ‘Elephants spaces’. These are spaces between the formal structures and informal networks, where everyone feels relaxed and informal. They can then leave their ‘labels’ at the door and communicate in ways that everyone understands.
In ‘Elephants spaces’, people from very different backgrounds learn and make decisions together. They test practical solutions to key issues faced by communities and by agencies.
The Elephants Trail starts with exploring and building relationships between people with very different life experiences and ways of seeing things. Getting to know each other enables open discussion about power, wealth, inequalities and the most difficult issues.
Each team then shares influence and makes decisions together. This includes deciding what they will work on. This means ‘leaning’ into situations where there are differences and tensions and saying what needs to be said, rather than suppressing these using power, wealth and status.
The teams actively work together for practical change on issues that directly affect the lives of people with the hardest lives. The aim is to create long-term solutions in which people believe and trust and see fairer outcomes.
Along the way, the teams learn together about not only the issues and each other, but also how to work together effectively.
The Elephants Trail encourages personal development. Some people have described their experience as “life changing” and “the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
Frequently asked questions
Why is it called the Elephants Trail?
When talking about multiple disadvantage experienced by people who have the hardest lives, the most difficult issues are often avoided. These ‘elephants in the room’ include inequalities in power and wealth.
We are on the Elephants Trail so that people with lived experience and professionals can talk about these issues and then work together to address the challenges.
Who can join the Elephants Trail groups?
Wherever the Elephants Trail is active, its groups and spaces are open to people who have the hardest lives and want to take constructive action to improve things.
By this, we mean people who have experienced a combination of several experiences, including homelessness, substance misuse, domestic violence, contact with the criminal justice system and/or mental ill-health.
Where is it based?
The Elephants Trail operates in localities that want to address multiple disadvantage together with local people who experience it, by enabling the Elephants Trail approach.
What is genuine co-production?
Co-production with local people is a culture and a mindset. It is not consultation, involvement or participation. It explores new solutions to the most challenging issues, with a strong emphasis on learning.
Critically, co-production with local people requires honest reflection on:
- who holds power (including control of resources)
- how power can be developed and shared
- how unequal power will be addressed (not least with people who are most marginalised)
Co-production with local people means doing some things differently. It is an exchange between ‘experts’ (local people and ‘the system’), with a diversity of mindsets. It solves problems through ongoing explorations. The ‘system’ needs to have the culture to be ready and willing to respond positively to the results.
What do you mean by ‘the system’?
By ‘the system’, we mean those agencies that have the power and resources to make significant decisions that affect the lives of local people and communities.
By ‘systems’, we mean how these decisions are made, by whom, in whose interests, with whose evidence and with what values and assumptions. They include societal, economic and institutional systems.
What is system change?
Our goal is the creation of systems of justice, compassion and liberation that enable people subject to marginalisation to live with dignity and opportunity in supportive communities.
The Elephants Trail therefore focuses on power and wealth, culture, mindsets and relationships, all of which are key to understanding the dynamics of complex interlocking systems.
Our aim is not just to challenge existing systems, but to create spaces for very different systems to be created. This means action that reveals, dismantles, reimagines, heals and renews systems.