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Exploring AT with People

Involving the people you work with is at the heart of an AT culture.

Meaningfully involving people in shaping an AT service means ensuring that everyone has a shared understanding and awareness of the concepts, purpose and aims. Here we’ll explore how to begin doing this with the people you work with.

Meaningfully involving people in shaping an AT service means ensuring that everyone has a shared understanding and awareness of the concepts, purpose and aims. Here we’ll explore how to begin doing this with the people you work with.

In This Section

To engage with asset-based approaches, the people accessing your service should ideally be introduced to, and experience the significance of, a number of key background concepts.

These concepts are:

  • A positive focus on creating opportunity and good
  • Working with and promoting people’s personal strengths
  • Giving people greater control and influence over their life
  • Growing community strengths, networks and relationships
  • Bringing about changes that increase positive potential and perception
  • Balancing understanding, language and approach between ‘needs’ and ‘abilities’
Activities to explore the concepts of AT

Below is a list of suggestions for engaging activities you can facilitate with people accessing your service to explore their thoughts, feelings and experiences. To begin, you will need to create a series of asset-based statements to work with. You can create these based on the 7 Tests and informed by your service context. For example:

  1. We use positive language when talking about people.
  2. We avoid negatively stereotyping people and try to understand who they are.
  3. We work with people in a way that focuses on their strengths and talents.

Create as many or few as you like. We recommend creating about 10 asset-based statements for people to work with. You can then use them as the basis for the following activities, which should all act as prompts for deeper discussion and exploration:

  1. Prioritise the statements in order of importance, and explore the reasons for the choices made.
  2. Put the statements the organisation does well on one side and the ones it does less well in on the other.
  3. Produce personal statements and explain how these add to or improve any of the statements already provided.
  4. Imagine you has to advise a decision maker which three statement areas they should focus on in order to achieve the greatest benefit for young people. Which would you pick and why?
  5. Score each statement for the organisation in terms of whether they agree, partly agree, partly disagree, or disagree, noting where and how the organisation can improve.
  6. Illustrate a statement using any creative form of expression that captures ideas, feelings and experiences in response to the statements.

These activities can be done on an individual basis or in a large or small group – whatever setting is most appropriate to encourage reflection with the individuals you work with. Remember to relay back to the participants any impact their input has had in the coming days, weeks and months to demonstrate their positive impact on the organisation.

Developing an organisational approach page

Up Next in Going Deeper

Developing an organisational approach

Find ways to embed the approach sustainably within your organisation to continue to improve outcomes for the people you work with and build a positive, resilient culture.