To boost the work and resources required to support the project the GRIP researchers gained support from: The Families Commission's Innovative Practice Fund, the Ministry of Social Development's SPEaR Linkages fund and the ASB Trusts in partnership with the ANZASW. The University Of Auckland Faculty Of Education Research Fund and The University of Auckland Staff Research Fund have also provided generous support of the programme to date. The support gained enabled us to employ a project manager Deborah Yates, and we brought a practitioner advisor into the team, Glenda Light ,to act as an advocate and advisor on behalf of practitioners.
Over the course of the year nine expressions of interest were selected as projects to go forward with various teams and agencies being parties to the programme. A series of workshops were organised involving speakers and resource packages that have now been published as a ‘collection of resources' and a final symposium was held in March 2007 where the participants presented their studies or explained their involvement in the initiative. These two collections are now published resources from the project.
In turn the research team has published an initial outline of the GRIP project in Social Work Review and has further publications in the pipeline. Participants were interviewed at two points in the project; once during the year when projects were in development and again nine months after the symposium to assess the impact of the project on the work and continuing development of the practitioners. This material will form the basis of the mapping analysis that remains to be completed as part of the project.
GRIP article
Beddoe, L., Fouché, C., Harington, P., Light, G., Lunt, N., & Yates, D. (2007).
Growing Research In Practice: The story so far (249kB)
. Social Work Review, 19(1), 39-50.
* We gratefully acknowledge that this article is available with permission from the Editors of Social Work Review
