Writing
Our Managing Director, Dr Helen Kara, is an experienced writer, and is passionate about clear communication through language. Her research skills complement her writing skills.
Helen is currently writing a peer-reviewed book, Research and Evaluation for Practitioners: A Time-Saving Guide. This will be published by The Policy Press, in the UK in October 2012 and in the US in December 2012.
She is also lead author of Commissioning Consultancy (Russel House, 2003) and has written articles for Community Care, Housing Today and The British Journal of Occupational Learning. Her PhD thesis, on partnership working, management and social policy, was described by her examiners as "the best-written PhD they had ever seen" (this thesis is freely available for download, see below). She has also written for broadcast (over 20 humanist ‘Thoughts For The Day’ on BBC Radio Stoke) and has sold several short stories to women's magazines.
Writing clients include:
- Kindle (formerly the Community Sector Partnership for Children and Young People) – Commissioning And The Community Sector
- Charity Commission – Going Green, Cause For Complaint?
- National Association of Volunteer Bureaux (now Volunteering England) - Going The Extra Mile, Somebody Else’s Problem
Dr Helen Kara is a member of the Society of Authors.
Chameleons In A Kaleidoscope: How It Feels To Work In Partnership As A Sure Start Manager (click to download, 1.3Mb PDF)
This is Dr Helen Kara's PhD thesis, published in 2006. It offers a sharp critique of some of the destructive aspects of New Labour's modernisation agenda, and an illuminating exploration of the emotional demands of managing development work with children and families in areas of deprivation. It contains information about a new method of data collection using storytelling, and demonstrates the enormous potential of this method to produce rich data about sensitive subjects. It also outlines an innovative method of data analysis using multiple coding frames, and gives a reflexive account of the PhD process written in a creative fictionalised style. The relationships between fact and fiction, truth and authenticity, and issues of partnership, identity, emotion and language, are explored in detail.
