Team JAM Update – Hot Chocolate

Guest blog from Lisa Pattoni: Facilitator of the Hot Chocolate group.

Where is the Love?

The Hot Chocolate group (young people and workers) was great to work with – they threw themselves in, knew each other really well but made me, the young people from Who Cares?, Mike from Renfrewshire and Sarah (our visualiser) more than welcome. The barrier they chose to focus on was ‘where is the love?’.

As a group, this meant we spent a lot of time asking ourselves questions like: ‘What is love?’ ‘What does love mean?’ ‘Doesn’t everyone deserve to feel loved?’ to get our thinking and understanding going.

These are all very difficult and emotive questions, but it was worth pushing through the discomfort because we were really pleased with the ideas we developed together. It was also worth working in a variety of ways (i.e. allowing people time to reflect on their own, work in pairs, write thoughts down and working in a big group) to enable people who felt less comfortable thinking on their feet.

The brief that we were given allowed a lot of creative freedom which was great, but also a little overwhelming, and I could tell a few people were a bit like ‘we can come up with any idea we want?’ So, this meant that we were the only team to break the rules and not produce an idea for the ‘ideas shrine’. We were ok with this, because we’d needed to spend more time thinking about this abstract concept and how we’d each individually perceived it.

Our ideas centred around challenging the system to think more about ‘love’ through writing a manual, or doing some training sessions, then we realized that ‘love’ is such an individual, personal thing, that writing something down about it would be nearly impossible! This is where the idea came from.

Wouldn’t it make more sense, and be more powerful, to just highlight a range of thoughts and perceptions from young people about what love means to them? Wouldn’t this show how important it is? Wouldn’t this put ‘love’ back on the agenda? How about creating a platform for young people and workers to share their thoughts about love? This could be designed to enable practitioners to reflect on their practice, and to give young people the chance to express how they feel.

So, we tried it. In the ‘create’ phase, we took wee film clips of each member of the group talking about what ‘love’ looks like to them, what they wish it was like, and why they think it is difficult to talk about in the care system.

And it was worth it. When we showed the clips to the rest of the JAMmers, we couldn’t hear a pin drop. There is something about the honesty and vulnerability of the clips that is both moving and inspiring – how could it not be when each person was giving away something quite personal about themselves?

My last tweet of the day thanked the group for being so wonderful and brave, and that’s genuinely how I felt. Although we had a lot of fun at the JAM, exploring these types of issues is serious – and it’s stuff that can’t (and shouldn’t) be ignored.