Furthermore and the Myplace team at the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, have embarked on a new project with support from Catalyst and National Lottery funding. 

Myplace is a green prescribing initiative run by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust which aims to increase mental wellbeing through connecting clients to the natural environment in a group setting. It is predicted that due to COVID-19, almost 20% of the population will need either new or additional mental health support making initiatives like Myplace essential in supporting community mental health service provision. 

The aim of the current project is to increase the number of people who move from initial enquiry  or referral to actually joining Myplace and experiencing the benefits of connecting with nature via ecotherapy. 

A key element of the project is to work in the open so that similar services can use our approach, methods and reflections to develop their own prototypes. To share our journey we’ll be drafting weeknotes describing and reflecting on our work over the past week. You’ll be able to read these via our Medium account at the links below. 

Weeknotes Week 1
Discovery phase kickoff featuring an Ecosystem map, HEART framework and Service Blueprint.

Weeknotes Week 2
The Myplace team share their key takeaways including the Inverse Care Law and the Design Justice framework.

Weeknotes Week 3
We continue our discovery phase listening to prospective service users who hadn’t completed the onboarding journey and created empathy maps and a customer journey map for each type of persona.

Weeknotes Week 4
The Myplace team reflect on our fourth week working together as we prioritise the opportunities identified through developing our customer journey map.

Weeknotes Week 5

This week we devised our design hypotheses and used our thinking to define our prototypes and develop our testing plan comprising three communication pathways.

Weeknotes Week 6

Rhoda, project manager at Myplace reflects on an industrious week creating prototypes and getting to grips with Hubspot as a technical solution for testing.

Weeknotes Week 7

This week has been focused on the practical logistics of our test and onboarding the project officers who represent a key touch point during the Myplace referral process.

Weeknotes Week 11

After a weeknote hiatus during the testing period, Myplace project manager Rhoda shares the team’s reflections on the testing process.

Weeknotes Week 12

In our final weeknotes we reflect on our learnings throughout the project.