It appears that services of many kinds in the UK and elsewhere have been asking: is the PIE idea just suitable for homelessness services? Could the same thinking, and the same simple framework, be as useful in other fields? 

In a short paper – prepared for SITRA's bulletin, and intended to be later available as a leaflet –  Robin Johnson suggests that the underlying thinking, and even the specific 5 or 6 key themes that characterise a PIE, could be applied in many other areas of social practice, both formal and informal.

NB:  As this was intended as a short statement, there is insufficient time or space to go into more of the history of the development of the idea. But some of it may be gleaned from the Further Reading references – and in particular,

• in the social psychiatry thinking that has threaded through mental health care as a recessive trait, re-appearing where most needed (Johnson & Haigh, 2010), and
• in the article (Haigh et al, 2012) on the more immediate roots of the PIE idea in the Enabling Environments programme.
• in the development of new ways of thinking about the post-War 'therapeutic community' movement, in a still earlier document, that began to analyse the wide variety of "TC" models, and their underlying common threads - and is the first usage of the term 'enabling environment", in this context (Johnson, 1980, 2015)

Papers

Is a PIE just about homelessness? (Johnson, 2015)

Social Psychiatry and Social Policy for the 21st Century (Part One); The psychologically Informed Environment” (Johnson & Haigh, 2010)

Psychologically Informed Environments and the “Enabling Environments” initiative” (Haigh R, Harrison T, Johnson R, Paget S, & WilliamsS, 2012)

Podcasts

The therapeutic community model in mental health (Johnson, 2015)