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In mid-February, I had the pleasure of meeting and learning with the InWithForward team as they spent the day debriefing, analyzing and idea-generating as part of the Apeldoorn Starter Project to support women in the domestic violence shelter system.
I’m a Canadian graduate student, feminist organizer and social policy researcher. I understood, in principle, what the Starter project wanted to achieve. The violence-against-women sector – in the Netherlands or elsewhere – is often enormously underfunded and the bottom of most politician’s priority lists. The objective of the project, however, is an important one: to listen and observe the realities of women and their families in the shelter system and use their perspectives to shape policymaking and system redesign.
In my work with women’s organizations, it’s been essential that both the process and the outcomes of policy change have embedded feminist principles. InWithForward was conscious of both: the importance of women’s agency in shaping the issues and institutions that affect their lives, the necessity of validating and supporting women’s diverse identities, and firming rooting the personal in the political. How should women’s stories and narratives drive the direction of the project, and how should the women involved be integrated into every step, from design to implementation? What does it mean to make policy that is woman and family-centred and trauma-informed? What about relations of power and control, particularly for women in precarious circumstances?
What excited me most was how the InWithForward team brought together feminist principles and deep knowledge of the local policy context with a unique, analytical systems design approach. While we explored each individual woman’s story deeply and carefully, the insights emerged when we mapped the women together on various axes. How could we graph their individual readiness to leave the shelter? How does that interact with their citizenship status, their job-relevant skills, or the size of their social network and level of family support? What could that suggest about gaps in policy, service provision or funding?
I’m very grateful to InWithForward for an energizing, provocative day of learning about how to manage complexity and draw connections between feminist ideals and political realities. Some of my key take-aways include:
- Find ways the macro and micro, personal and political, intersect. I was frequently reminded of the infamous 1970s feminist slogan “the personal is political”. The minutiae of women’s lives were deeply meaningful from a systems redesign perspective – everything from the types of meals they prepared as a family to their encounters with various social services. By “zooming in” and “zooming out” throughout our analysis, we balanced micro observations with macro implications to generate ideas that were relevant to women’s daily lives.
- The process and people are equally (if not more) important than the outcomes. Our analysis focused on the process of organizing our data and engaging as many diverse perspectives and interpretations as possible. For feminist work in particular, the values of inclusion and non-hierarchy are essential – and InWithForward expertly convened a room full of “unlikely suspects” (everyone from social workers to designers, academics to policy practitioners), allowing for a much more rich and nuanced discussion.
- Data doesn’t have to be linear. It can be analyzed creatively – even layered, reorganized, and flipped upside down. We graphed, compared, juxtaposed, colour-coded and Post-It Noted until all the project data had been understood in multiple ways. We experimented with the scale and scope of ideas to help make the shelter system more supportive and streamlined. InWithForward brought rigour to their creativity – an approach that I admired deeply.
What do you think of systems redesign through a feminist lens? How can feminist and social change theory and policy praxis work together?