How could you leverage the diverse expertise and participation from across the borough to skill people up and create a more inclusive and dynamic community?
How could you cultivate a pool of highly skilled leaders who can effectively run activities that demand high levels of expertise in participation, thereby ensuring the quality and impact of community initiatives?
How could you enable future participation leaders developed through the academy to help grow & accelerate collaborative activities?
How could you encourage local organisations to better involve residents in their activities through staff improving their participation skills?
1. Supporting frontline staff to support people power in communities
We can learn from programmes supporting:
- Frontline staff to better work together to support residents in Newham (Social Welfare Alliance) and beyond (Systems Changers)
- Residents to work together to develop solutions in Newham (Community Assemblies, Citizens Assemblies, Youth Zones) and beyond (Everyone Everyday)
- People with lived experience to develop their skills in participation in Newham (Newham Health Champions) and beyond (Young Foundation Peer Research Network, Emerging Futures Fund)
2. Supporting residents to turn their community activities into ventures
We can learn from new ventures created to turn participation into a livelihood:
- Accrediting residents supporting participation (Public Collaboration Lab Digital Badges, Birkbeck Community Leadership programme)
- Imagine the transformation when residents develop employability skills in participation and are paid for it. The future is bright for our Communities.
- Developing new ventures that sell participation services (i.e. Gloucestershire Community Builders, Year Here)
3. Supporting people to apply their practice to real challenges
We can learn from programmes that support leadership development in ways that get people to test out their learning in the field:
- Supporting people to work in small groups on specific challenges (Enrol Yourself)
- Support people to apply their learning by supporting the frontline and developing new ventures (Year Here)
To explore this further, you are going to:
- Run a discovery with strategic partners on their priorities in supporting residents in getting involvedin shaping their programmes & strategies. This should lead to insights on what challenges/priorities a participation academy could focus on to ensure that it gets people to learn by applying their skills to a specific challenge.
- Run a discovery with services & partners on the skills needed to run participation activities — with a focus on citizens’ assemblies. This should lead to insights on what skills a participation academy should focus on training residents to develop to run participation activities.
- Run a discovery with residents on what skills they’d like to develop in running participation activities from those above and what learning methods/activities would best work. This should lead to insights on what skills a participation academy should focus on training residents to develop to run participation activities.
- Run a discovery with organisations to understand their business models for training programmes. This should lead to developing options for business models on how best a participation academy could be funded and managed.
- Design of a prototype participation academy through a programme bringing together a cohort of residents to learn skills in running participation activities and applying them to a specific challenge identified above. This should lead to developing a service blueprint and business case on how best to deliver a participation academy.
