Sparks Grove and the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames Partner to Understand Homelessness

Sparks Grove’s London team recently partnered with the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames council to help it better understand homelessness in the borough. The council has encountered shrinking housing budgets, the introduction of the homelessness reduction bill, a bill designed to give councils funding to assess if someone is at risk of becoming homeless before they are homeless, and fewer successful cases of homelessness prevention in the council.

Kingston council wanted to use a user-centered design approach to understand the trigger events that cause homelessness. It also wanted to better understand how partner and council services could be more effectively utilized to help prevent the onset of homelessness in the borough.

To help with this issue, Sparks Grove conducted three two-week homelessness agile sprints using user-centered design (UCD) methodology.

The team did this by gathering existing insights and data on homelessness in the borough and the United Kingdom. They combined this with new user data, research and insights they gathered about homelessness across the council.

Sparks Grove also conducted interviews with people currently experiencing homelessness or those at risk of becoming homeless, as well as practitioners in the council. This generated a library of user profiles and journeys the council can continue to develop. From this, the team also came up with methods for gathering insights and redesigning future services for the council. 

The team also mapped the journeys with its journey mapping tool, created profiles and created deep dives to gain further insight into council processes, highlighted the costs of existing processes and the savings and value that could be generated through improvements. This created metrics that allow implementation success to be measured over time.

The work resulted in a detailed recommendations roadmap that prioritized opportunities in communications, advice and support, digital solutions and collaboration both in the long term and the roll out of quick wins for the next one to three months.

Through knowledge transfer and upskilling, Sparks Grove also helped the council team in agile ways of working and user centered design, which allowed it to carry on delivering work independently.

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