How to Build Your Own Norval Morris Project

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Why Create a Norval Morris Project?

In human services, as in physics, systems tend to favor the status quo above change and to drift from rigorous fidelity to standards and ideals toward more laissez faire practices. Bringing innovation to human service systems, or even maintaining fidelity to original goals, requires ongoing, intentional efforts from change agents—leadership, line staff, clients, client advocates, stakeholders, and policy makers—who are willing to take on entrenched bureaucracies and stagnant policies to:

Create new ways of delivering services,
Develop innovative policies,
Implement evidence-based practices,
Generate positive shifts in the field,
Question current practices, and
Speak out about abuses and inhumane treatment of clients.

Following the change efforts of Dr. Norval Morris, the Norval Morris Project is working to bring together change agents in a variety of human service fields, disciplines, and perspectives to create an environment in which innovation efforts and strategies may be freely explored. Bringing together a number of human service system representatives, with an ongoing focus on generating innovations, rather than on solving any particular system problem, the Project aims to provide human service fields with continually fresh perspectives to combat systems’ tendencies to become rigid, entrenched, and inhumane.

In planning this Project, NIC and J-SAT realized that the process of creating forums to facilitating ongoing innovation was not unique to corrections and related human services. Other organizations might benefit from developing their own forums by referencing the documentation of the Project’s processes of strategic planning, resource development, and methods of identifying and engaging field leaders. Documentation of project processes therefore became one of the Project’s Knowledge Projects. As the project unfolds, more detail and process desciptions will be added to this page to assist other organizations in similar project development.

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