The social impact of pandemic

23 June 2020: TodayTraverse, the Ada Lovelace Institue, Bang the Table and Involve premiered a trial online deliberation on exit strategies from Covid 19 lockdown with 25 members of the public.  Watch the video here.

17th April 2020: Two weeks on and we've been lifting our heads up and looking a little further ahead this week, getting our second wind after the bank holiday weekend.

We've been thinking about how the tools we use to explore uncertain futures, like simulations and scenario workshops, can help organisations explore the post-covid future. 

Next week we'll start a rapid research project to understand the lived experience of people whose healthcare has been disrupted by covid-19, either because they couldn't access care, or because they didn't feel able to ask for it. We'll share the findings as soon as they're in. 

We've also started to scope some work to equip people with mental health problems, who are also digitally excluded, with the devices and skills they need to access online services and take part in crucial covid-19 research. We were prompted by this article in the Lancet about the need to understand the impact of covid-19 and measures to prevent it's spread on mental as well as phsyical health. 

                                                                   

2nd April 2020: For us the dust is settling, and we’re getting used to the new normal of working remotely as a team. We’re adapting, taking care of each other, and we’re doing ok. We’re rising to the challenge, sticking to our mission and committed to continuing to have a positive social impact, and focusing on where we can make the most difference. We’re sharing these topics as part of an ongoing conversation we’re having with our clients, our colleagues and our peers about our role in a changing world.

We know that we must learn from this experience and fast. The public sector is acting with incredible dedication, at astonishing speed and now more than ever we need to know what works, and why.

We have adapted our evaluation and research tools to work faster and smarter to support organisations that are responding to the crisis - focusing on rapid cycle design and evaluating online solutions.

We are using the expert skills of our team and partners and the learning from over 30 years to focus on what will have the biggest impact. Where we think our learning can help others, like our work on flexible scheduling of NHS staff, we will share this openly and rapidly.

We also know that it is imperative that we continue to keep involving people in the decisions that affect them. Society is changing around us, and it’s vital that we don’t leave people behind.

Where we can adapt our consultation and engagement tools to help involve people quickly and proportionately in decision making, we are.  Where we can trial new approaches, like the prototype distributed dialogues we’re setting up with our neighbours, or by summarising the evidence on diversity and inclusion online, we’ll share our learning there too. 

We also hope that we can make a difference as individuals. Traverse is an employee owned company, and our employee owners are pretty amazing people. Where the most useful thing we can do right now is to support our neighbours, our families and our communities, we’re doing that.

We’ll update this page regularly as and when we identify new ways we can help, and if you think we can support you, please get in touch with Lucy at lucy.farrow@traverse.ltd.