Welcome to our new site - a hub for frontline bloggers to share their insights and experience, and inform better social policy. If you work at the frontline of public and voluntary services, or use services and experience particular issues personally, we’d love for you to blog with us here.
We’ve written before here about our love of public and voluntary service bloggers, and how we’d almost always rather read a dispatch from the frontline than (largely) warmed-over opinion from a Westminster-centric commentator. At their best, frontline bloggers capture the day-to-day reality of public services in a way that no-one else can, including the dirty, difficult, and sometimes dangerous experiences that form the basis of real expertise and so the insights we need to improve social policy.
Frontline bloggers often engage directly in policy issues, but from a practical, pragmatic and informed perspective that could surely be incorporated into policymaking before we’ve wasted millions of pounds (and harmed people’s lives) introducing policies that are destined to fail. So much ‘professional’ commentary is dominated by that week’s ‘inside baseball’ nonsense, to the exclusion of how policy effects real lives and how it could be improved. Frontline bloggers make policy real, sometimes uncomfortably so from the perspective of policy wonks - which is probably why their views aren’t usually invited into national policy debates (Guardian Professional Networks is a notable exception, along with parts of the trade press).
We want to put the real insiders where they belong - at the centre of policy. What we’re looking for are practitioners and services users who can provide a real-life perspective on policy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t consider yourself an expert - in fact, we’d prefer it if you didn’t (self-proclaimed ‘expertise’ often denoting an arrogance and insularity from other viewpoints). It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the ‘right’ words, because writing that’s worth reading doesn’t depend on anything other than your proximity to the reality of public and voluntary services. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t write for us every week (you have a life to live and a job to do, after all) - we’d prefer it if you posted when you have something to say and a bit of time to reflect.
If you already blog, we’d love to syndicate you here and hopefully add to you readership. And if you’ve never blogged before, why not give it a go - your voice deserves to be heard as much as anyone else’s. If you’re interested or have any questions, contact us at [email protected], via Twitter @guerillapolicy or through the get involved form on this site - and we look forward to hearing from you.
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