Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities

November 2023
Systems Change
Evaluations
Good Practice Guides

First Three Years Of Working With Communities report

Read the report

Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities

November 2023
Systems Change
Evaluations
Good Practice Guides

Learning from the first three years of working with communities

This report summarises learnings from three years of working with communities across England and Wales. It highlights crucial lessons on new ways of designing and resourcing local services to provide sustainable support for people facing complex issues such as homelessness, addiction and domestic abuse. 

Small charities are providing essential services such as refuges, shelters and recovery support in their communities. However, after more than a decade of austerity, charities have seen their funding decline and these local services are being stretched or cut. Meanwhile, more and more people are turning to charities for help – especially during the past few years, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

Creating a solution, together

Since 2019, we’ve been working with six communities across England and Wales to improve systems and services – in Bolsover, Great Yarmouth, Halton, Merthyr Tydfil, Redcar and Cleveland, and Telford and Wrekin. 

In each of these communities, public and private organisations, academic institutions, and people who live locally, have come together to explore new ways of strengthening small charities and designing and resourcing local services to better support people facing complex issues.

Our learning partner, Brightpurpose, has been observing and evaluating our approach and helping us apply learnings as we go. This report summarises the key lessons we have learned over the first three years; we hope it will inspire and encourage others working towards long-term and sustainable change in their communities.

The Team was clear from the very beginning that they were not offering a predefined grant programme for system change. They were offering facilitation, support, access to knowledge and skills, and the opportunity to learn together how to work differently, alongside providing tailored resources to support communities, based on their needs as they explore new ways of working together. There is significant investment from the Foundation, but not a ‘system change fund’ per se.

Report finding

Our key learnings from working with communities

Lasting change takes time. Relationships are essential to this work, and they need to be characterised by trust, candour and the ability to disagree productively before the hard work can begin. Trust cannot be rushed.
  
The role of money. The absence of funding has not been a barrier to local engagement. Rather than funding this work directly, the Foundation has invested in the capacity for people to come together to make the change. 
Even positive change is hard. Even though local partners are committed to the positive vision for their chosen issue, the practicalities of truly changing the system mean changes and potentially loss for individuals and organisations, especially those with power. 
Sometimes it takes more than one try. As there’s no map to this work, there’s no guarantee of success the first time. Failure is an integral part of innovation. 
Local ownership. It’s unusual for a national organisation to work with the sole aim of supporting the local community’s ambition to change their own systems. Some local stakeholders struggle to accept and trusts such an approach. But the Foundation needs to continually guard against owning or driving the work.
Voluntary, Community or Social Enterprise (VCSE) infrastructure and sector strength. While local system innovation is likely to strengthen the VCSE sector, there needs to be a baseline strength within the sector for this innovation to be inclusive and effective.
Communication and messaging. It’s important to develop ways of communicating to help people grasp the concepts of system change and how they can be a part of it.
Speaking the hard truths. The Foundation has has been invited into communities in a role as a critical friend, and by speaking out they could have strengthened their local relationships and helped to resolve issues more quickly.
Resisting the allure of technical solutions. We must encourage local partners to resist the allure of simpler service-based solutions which may offer short term success but are unlikely to produce long-term change.
The right balance. We identified four factors that we refer to as the ‘Goldilocks’ factors that must always be balanced – power, certainty, pace and shape. Too much or too little of each has a negative impact, so it’s essential to find the right balance.

Even if we had £5m, it would limit our horizons to what we could do with that £5m. And when we’d spent it, we’d be right back where we started. Taking money off the table means we can look at what needs to change and work on that together. Then when we’ve worked out what we need to do differently, we can work out how to fund it.

Community feedback

Tools you can use

Working differently locally takes time, from starting to work with communities to progressing the work. This process can be broken down into four distinct phases:

Building early engagement
Agreeing a shared ambition
Defining a focal issue
Moving forward

The Foundation identified different approaches and methods that have proved effective in progressing each phase of work. These are described below:

Advanced Facilitation

Design, organisation and facilitation of events and workshops that bring people together to agree their shared ambitions and explore the barriers to realising them.

Causal Loop Mapping

A methodology for identifying the underlying causes of complex issues, which maps the causal relationships between different elements in a system.

Action Learning Sets

A structured model for group problem-solving and shared learning, involving group members coming together to share and work through challenges.

Service Design

A structured methodology for exploring and designing new or improved services, with extensive involvement of the people who would use the service.

Appreciative Inquiry

Exploring change in organisations and systems by focusing on building from existing strengths. This flips the prevalent deficit focus in organisations and systems and unlocks new ideas and creativity.

System Maturity Model

A rubric-based framework for assessing a local system’s current level of maturity across nine dimensions of working collectively. You can use the model to help plan how you change and improve your systems, and also to evaluate your progress.

We’ve all worked here and known each other for years, but we’ve never come together like this before.

Community feedback

The full report

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The summary report

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The toolkit

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Watch People and Communities:
Three Years In

At this online event we share what we’ve learned from three years of working in six communities for local change to better support people experiencing complex issues and barriers. Watch in full.

Download the presentation slides and transcript

Presentation slides Transcript

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Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities

Learning From The First Three Years Of Working With Communities

Learning from the first three years of working with communities

Creating a solution, together

Our key learnings from working with communities

Tools you can use

The full report

The summary report

The toolkit

Watch People and Communities:Three Years In

Download the presentation slides and transcript

Related Reports

Mission Critical 3

Our support on the homelessness charity sector

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Watch People and Communities:
Three Years In