My PhD research on social exclusion had shown that children and youth at risk of exclusion are the most difficult to reach populations (in the UK and globally). This is often because the stakeholders involved in ensuring wellbeing of these populations are embedded within paradigms of Institutions and roles that they represent, resulting in very little actual communication achieved even during scheduled sessions of interaction.
Therapeutic interventions, therefore, need to be non-institutional and embedded within the empowerment paradigm where the process is driven by the marginalized groups rather than being passive recipients. Constructive communication processes that would traverse differences between symbolic and real worlds of all parties are essential to reaching marginalized populations. Power differences, status divide, institutional affiliations, and divergent subjective experiences of those trying to reach marginalized groups from the populations they are trying to reach create barriers to participatory processes to social inclusion.
Spritivity is a communication tool that was successfully applied in this project to create a dynamic, constructive platform for equal participation of all parties involved. The idea was to develop a methodology for non-institutional, therapeutic based intervention to lift barriers to social inclusion by creating experiences of empowered action. Spritivity was used successfully to achieve this goal.