Councils have all got ambitious visions to make their local areas better. They know they can’t achieve this on their own and know this means doing some things differently. They need to work with people who have different levers for change, can provide additional resources and test new ways of tackling issues.
There are other organisations in local areas which act as anchors to support the well-being of our local area — be it health and other public services, universities, colleges & schools, housing associations, major employers & businesses, and other major service providers be they in the voluntary or private sector. Be it how they contribute to the well-being of the local economy & communities, such as recruiting local people or supporting community or startups. We also have a diversity of anchors, from universities to our community anchors, and public spaces, like libraries or parks. We have a strong reputation for mobilising our anchor institutions to innovate around common causes.
By developing a portfolio of experiments testing the different levers we have, we can learn how we might scale collaborations across our strategic partnerships, decide what we actively make a local focus, and influence nationally and even internationally.
We need to recognise and build on the existing ways we work together. It’s essential to remember the existing infrastructure we have in place to collaborate.
We set up Help Newham to mobilise staff and residents to provide emergency support during the pandemic.
We set up the Newham Social Welfare Alliance, which brings together frontline workers from local organisations to support residents together who are at risk of crisis or in crisis.
We have set up local Health Champions to co-produce how we engage residents in protecting themselves from the virus, now leading a national network of Health Champions.
We are supporting partners leading participation programmes such as the London Prosperity Board’s citizen science programme and Birkbeck University’s community leadership programme in Newham and commissioned Compost to support the borough’s voluntary, community & faith sector to develop its capability.
Use skills that councils wouldn’t usually call upon to tackle an issue, in this case getting industrial designers to prototype furniture in overcrowded housing, storytellers to develop narratives with young people to create new youth hubs or product designers to help separate waste better.
Get people to think differently about how to tackle an issue, whether it’s a game to get people to consider how they would rebuild a library that had been burnt to the ground, a tool likening the library to a fantasy island and asking citizens to locate the sites on the island that were most valued by them and explain why or a method asking citizens to ‘operate on the library’ by selecting and prioritising the values that were most important to them.
Share & codify the lessons learned to develop people's use & adapt the methodologies for future projects, so you can see who is best to involve at what stage of the process.
