We’re a group of experienced practitioners operating at the hard edges of health, justice and social care systems.
We work on the premise that the systems we operate in were built for containment. They exist alongside many other containers within a wider ecosystem designed to distribute resources, process people, and manage risk. Increasingly, this ecosystem is expected to deliver positive change.
It’s not that this ecosystem is failing. It’s that it cannot do something it was never designed to do in the first place – deliver positive change that lasts.
Containers do not have permeable walls. They’re not designed for things to flow easily between them. Some people get locked in. Others get locked out. And as containers fill up, pressure builds. Then it builds and builds until things break. When all the containers are full, there aren’t enough resources to repair, strengthen or replace them.
So what all of us have created together – and continue to strive to maintain – is an ecosystem that is tired and under constant pressure, unable to meet ever increasing demand. As a result, everyone is facing is fallout – widespread, intergenerational fallout – that can no longer be controlled or contained.
Our work is about creating movement and momentum across the boundaries of the health, justice and social care ecosystem: addressing priorities that don’t have a prescribed home, fostering shared ownership of problems that can’t be neatly wrapped, and supporting delivery at key points of tension and transition.
The people we work with, whether system leaders, service providers, grassroots groups, entrepreneurs, founders or investors, buy into the idea that containerised ecosystems cause harm and are no longer sustainable. In the communities they live and work in, things like access, continuity, equity and inclusion aren’t moving from aspiration to action to outcome.
Strategies stall. Partnerships stagnate. Regulatory and delivery pressures expose the misalignment between decision-making and expected outcomes – particularly where responsibility sits across multiple organisations. Whilst they acknowledge that for the time being fallout is inevitable, their focus is on acting now, rather than relying on familiar structures, funding streams or ways of working to address the disproportionate fallout some people and communities are experiencing.
These leaders, organisations and groups are prepared to slow things down just enough to see what is really going on, both within their own sphere of influence and across the wider system. They’re working together in the breakage zones at the edges of a system, turning them into buffer zones. These are not fixed structures, but something more responsive and enterprising – shaped by the people closest to the problems, able to absorb pressure and adapt as it shifts – and which they can own.
