Alice Green is a Senior Designer and Doer at Capacity. Before joining Capacity, Alice worked for two charities – Home for Good, a fostering and adoption charity and Street Teams, a charity supporting children at risk of sexual exploitation. After moving to Liverpool, she worked at Liverpool City Council. Then a job appeared at Capacity. That was 5 and a half years ago.
Tell us a little bit about your job at Capacity.
Right now there are two main projects I’m working on OPSI Lab with the Fostering Team in Knowsley and Fundamental Voices* in Wirral. It’s really about working closely with brilliant people in local authorities to help them do something they can’t do on their own. I love working in different places with different teams – understanding the problem, thinking about how services could work better, all the way through to operationalising new ways of working.
A key part of any change, of course, is making sure you’re hearing the right voices in the work, and knowing the change only sticks if people are bought into it and own it for themselves, so in this job you have to be great at making sure you’re listening to people and feeding in what they think.
Fundamental Voices* is a National Lottery-funded project in Sefton and Wirral to put the experiences of young people and families at the heart of SEND services.
What brought you to public service design and innovation?
The work Capacity does brings together the things I care about and the skills I’ve built. I’m a foster carer and often come up against a system that doesn’t help families or the children and young people we help look after. It made me really passionate about better public services. So I feel lucky to be able to do that as my job now – to connect the things I care about with work that puts people at the centre of public services.
What does a typical day look like?
I know everyone says the same, but there really aren’t two days the same. I’ll tell you what I did yesterday; let’s go with that. It started with some work with the Fundamental Voices team, we’re working across Wirral and Sefton. We’re starting to baseline each of the places against our theory of change, so we spent some time planning how we do that.
The rest of the day was all about OPSI Lab and the test phase we’re running in Knowsley – building evaluation metrics and practical tools the team can use to capture both the numbers and the feedback from foster carers. Then it was prep for a recruitment session for today. Today’s been completely different!
What’s one project or moment that’s made you think, “This is why I love working here”?
So many. We had a big Fundamental Voices team meeting last week that really stretched our thinking. It’s great working with people who’ve done this kind of work across different countries and contexts, they really push you to sharpen your own thinking. I love that. It feels like I’m getting better at what I do.
Thinking about big moments, I have to mention Branch. Right before we launched, there was a head teacher who’d been part of the project from the start. When we showed him the launch site and talked through the model, he said “this does exactly what I hoped it would do. This is something we’ve really needed”. That was a bigger moment for me than the launch itself. Someone whose opinion I really valued telling us we’d got it right – that it would make the difference it meant to.
I knew Branch was significant. And when it launched, with 50-odd services as part of it, I remember thinking ‘this has reshaped how young people access the mental health support they need’.
If you could describe the culture at Capacity, what would it be in 3 words?
It’s a fast pace, and you have to really know what you’re trying to achieve and keep your eyes set on that. The team is great – clever, fun and they care about what they’re doing. So my three words would be energetic, purposeful and friendly.
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