Islington London Borough Council
Young Carer Journey Maps & Summary of Work
Health Registrar Cassie Moore, working on bettering support for Islington’s young carers, was putting together a workshop that would bring together professionals across health and social care.
At the same time, was writing a needs assessment, summarising the findings of her work and outlining the beginnings of an action plan.
To support with both, I built young carer ‘journey maps’ to act as visual facilitation tools at her workshop, and a visual summary to function as the first page of the needs assessment.
The journey maps were printed and laid on group tables for participants to compare and discuss.
Three young carers navigate systems and relationships, with touch points quite literally illustrating the potential long term effects of missed opportunities.
While the characters and stories are fictional, they are carefully constructed from real case studies and known struggles. The heart of this project lay in balancing authenticity with anonymity, avoiding stereotypes while safely opening up space for discussion.
Participants shared personal experiences, annotating real-world reflections on the posters. The key takeaway was how interconnected the responsibilities of all professionals in contact with young carers are, and the necessity of staying curious to the bigger picture and how they can help.
Following the event, Cassie and I caught up to discuss the source material for the visual summary I’d illustrate next, and whether findings from the workshop affected what should be included or its visual weighting. In these calls, I often give my read on what proportion of the graphic to allocate to each section (in this case around 30% for the data on young carers’ and the difficulty identifying and supporting them, 30% for their lived experience and what they say, 40% for what professionals can do to help) — it gives clients a prompt to shift the hierarchy of information, even if the raw documents are weighted differently.
Cassie now has a versatile visual summary to showcase the high-level impact of her work for Islington’s young carers. This asset is fully optimised for multiple formats: as an engaging presentation slide, a high-visibility LinkedIn post, or handing a printed copy to colleagues as a printed brief.
As a bonus, Cassie has a library of over 40 illustrations I’ve extracted from our collection of graphics, for use across supporting media.
These spot illustrations can be dropped inline on other slides of the same presentation, or throughout documents that talk about this work, extending the visual interest even on more text-heavy pages.
