Invitation to Tender: Project learning partner – Healing Justice London learning partnership

Background 

At Impact on Urban Health, we want to use our funding and expertise to remove the obstacles currently preventing everyone living in cities from experiencing good health and wellbeing. We believe we can achieve this by focusing on key complex issues which disproportionately affect people that live in urban places. 

These are children’s health and food, multiple long-term conditions, the health effects of air pollution, and children’s mental health. Our work is long-term and through partnerships forged at local, borough, national and international levels.   

Overview of the learning partnership project 

Impact on Urban Health and Healing Justice London have joined forces in a three-year partnership project. The aim of this project is to learn about and develop Healing Justice London’s novel approach to helping people and communities who experience systemic oppression to heal and build resilience towards achieving better health and wellbeing.  

Healing Justice London’s approach includes flagship interventions focused on tackling systemic problems of health injustice and health inequity at the individual, community, and institutional levels. Working across three levels, their work focusses on: 

• Sustaining movements: Interventions that focus on growing the capacities, skills and resources of grassroots movements, lived-experience leaders, community health providers and those at the frontlines to become sustainable and adaptive in contexts of oppression. Including interventions such as Movement Medicine providing politicised somatics training to leaders and peer innovation and learning practice labs to hack at issues threatening the sustainability of our organisations and movements and imaginate and iterate alternatives
• Community Interventions that create spaces for healing and learning for people who are experiencing or likely to experience marginalisation. The goal is to equip communities with tools to heal from trauma, analyse and learn from different struggles, develop a strong sense of self-connection, and practice collective liberation. Interventions include community programming and events and the Rehearsing Freedoms Festival
• Structural Interventions that work at an institutional level to include work that engages practitioners, leaders, and ‘experts by experience’ (service users) in collaboratively challenging and reshaping outdated and harmful narratives and practices within public health and policy. This is so that we can collectively reimagine more equitable health and care systems in the UK. Interventions include, the Deaths by Welfare project, documenting evidence of deaths linked to the welfare system, and people’s resistance to deadly welfare policies
• The learning partnership will also explore the lessons emerging from these types of interventions 

Key learning priorities  

We are eager to learn more about the design, delivery, and emerging lessons from the three intervention types mentioned above, especially the highlighted programmes – Movement Medicine and Rehearsing Freedoms. Success for us throughout this three-year learning journey looks something like this: 

1. We are creating spaces for reflection as a partnership. This is to understand information we are already collecting about how people, groups and communities have experienced our interventions; how they embody and apply these experiences to transform themselves; and how they facilitate the spread of transformation throughout their immediate connections, their institutions, and their local communities 
2. We are capturing lessons about which aspects of Movement Medicine, Rehearsing Freedoms and structural interventions are most helpful for contributing to positive experiences 
3. We are exploring different (existing and new) audiences who can benefit from experiencing our interventions, and who can help us to develop them further and progress a culture (in research and practice) that is supportive of healing justice practices 
4. We are practicing how to frame our language and communicate messages about the interventions and what we are learning so that we can reach, inspire, influence, and guide our different audiences to take up, embed or invest in our work 

We will work with the successful learning partner at the start of their journey with us to create a detailed three-year learning plan, including specific objectives, questions, outputs, and methodologies.  

What we’re looking for 

To successfully support this partnership project and help us achieve the above mentioned four wins, the learning partner must be able to demonstrate the following knowledge and skills: 

• Expert knowledge in healing justice, health justice, social justice, transformative justice, or abolitionist organising 
• Research skills, including being able to collect, analyse, synthesise, and present both quantitative and qualitative information and learnings from various audiences and contexts 
• Expert facilitation skills to create spaces to lead and coach our mixed team through iterative reflections and deliberations, ensuring that we are building our knowledge, refining our thinking, and making actionable decisions about our interventions and key influential audiences   
• Expert communication skills, particularly in research/science communication, or research/science storytelling, to help us creatively plan and test how we aim for, reach, and shift our audiences to feel, think and act in favour of our work 
• Expert project management skills 

We also require a learning partner who demonstrates: 

• Commitment to equitable and inclusive learning, research, and evaluation practices 
• Creativity and flexibility in responding to issues quickly and adjusting plans and approaches as needed 

Desirable knowledge includes: 

• Techniques for understanding and responding to how trauma affects people deeply 
• Familiarity with the UK health and care systems and strategic issues affecting racial equity in health 

Budget and timeframe 

Our budget for this learning work is up to £60,000, including expenses and VAT, over the next three years.   

We expect this learning work to begin in Spring 2024 with the appointment of the successful learning partner and a round of team and project inductions. The work will run for 2.5 years until September 2026. At a minimum, we anticipate having annual reflections, as well as dedicated periods built into the three years to capture lessons, explore and connect with audiences, and create, test and refine our language and messages. 

How to apply 

Interested individuals or organisations matching the knowledge, skills and attributes above can submit a short expression of interest (EOI) by email to Radhika Bynon no later than 10:00 on 9 February 2024.  

The EOI must include: 

• A short, written summary of the relevant knowledge, skills, and personal attributes which you/your team possess and can bring to the benefit of this learning partnership.   
• A short, written summary providing details of two different initiatives or projects you/your team have been directly involved in that are relevant to this learning partnership role. Details should describe your/your team’s role, the purpose or aim of the initiatives/projects and the major contributions you/your team personally made 
• A CV or biography for you/each member of your team. CVs or biographies may be copied in below the end of your written summaries, attached as separate documents, or hyperlinked under a “CVs and biographies” heading below the end of your written summaries 
• A list of your/each team member’s daily rate of pay, and any concerns you have at this stage about our allocated budget for this work

How we will assess expressions of interest 

EOIs will be screened by Radhika Bynon and Dr Deon Simpson from Impact on Urban Health, and Rebekah Delsol and a colleague from Health Justice London. They will be assessed on the following: 

• Relevant knowledge, skills, and personal attributes 
• Demonstrated understanding and expertise based on previous work 
• Affordability of the individual partner or proposed team 

We expect screening to take place during the week commencing 12 February 2024. 

We will meet with preferred candidates online to discuss the project and their interest further, most likely during the week commencing 19 February 2024.  We will also ask for the names and contact details of two references at the end of the discussion. 

We expect to decide on a learning partner by 26 February 2024.

To schedule a call to answer clarification questions, please email Deon Simpson.