POLICY
REALITY
Institutions intend to serve people. But between policy and practice, between one system and the next, something gets lost. For the teams navigating it, it means friction. For the people on the other side, it means falling through.
Still House works to close that gap.
The challenge is rarely about expertise or commitment. Institutions and the teams within them are often deeply skilled and genuinely motivated. What shapes how effectively they can function — and how well they can serve people — is how the systems surrounding them are structured, internally and across the broader ecosystem they operate in.
Within institutions, even the most committed teams find that decisions stall, mandates conflict, and policy doesn't translate into practice under real conditions. Accountability becomes unclear. Coordination slows. And the people closest to the work find themselves carrying complexity that the system wasn't designed to support.
Across sectors, systems that serve the same people — health, justice, education, protection, migration — often operate in silos. Frontline workers spend significant time navigating other institutions, coordinating across conflicting mandates, and advocating across systems. That is time not spent serving people. And the people most affected are those who need multiple systems at once — and who can least afford for those systems to fail to coordinate.
That gap has real human consequences. For the people navigating it, it means falling through. For the teams inside it, it means friction, burnout, and losing sight of why the work matters. Policies not designed with the people accessing them in mind, power dynamics that go unexamined, and processes that are difficult to navigate don't just underperform — they can erode trust, safety, and dignity.
Still House works to close both gaps — so that policy acts as permission and guidance, and systems actually support the work they were designed to do.
How we work
Still House is a different kind of advisory practice — collaborative, trauma-informed, and built around each institution's specific context, not imported from a generic model.
A trauma-informed lens runs through all of it — not only in recognising what communities have experienced, but in understanding that institutions and their processes can themselves create conditions that replicate harm. This shapes how frameworks are designed and how systems are built — so they are not only functional, but safe, accessible, and trustworthy for the people they are meant to serve.
The work starts with understanding how the system actually functions in practice, and builds from what institutions and teams already know.
The result is clearer decision-making under pressure, reduced time spent navigating across systems, and frontline teams that can focus on delivering care instead of managing bureaucracy. And for the people those systems are meant to serve — support that is better coordinated, more accessible, and experienced with greater trust, accountability, and dignity.
FOUNDER
Still House was founded by Laura Lockwood, a governance and policy advisor who has worked inside the systems that intersect most in people's lives — mental health, child protection, justice, gender, and humanitarian response — across Canada, North Africa, and conflict-affected environments. Her frameworks are built from the inside out, by someone who has navigated those systems from the frontline before moving into policy and systems development.
Still House is built on a simple observation: the gaps between policy and people keep appearing in every sector, every system, every context. And they are closeable.
If your institution is navigating this kind of complexity — internally, across sectors, or both — let's start a conversation.