Note from a Northern Roundtable: Levelling Up and Community Power

Summary of key points

• Government needs to invest in creating legitimacy, listening and learning, and become an enabler, not a controller.

• It’s important to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past - regeneration initiatives have been too top down, short-term and failed to reform the things that left people feeling powerless.

• An ambitious change of direction is needed – ‘go big, or go home’. Despite many efforts over many years, too little had changed. Government must avoid prescription and micro initiatives and let communities decide how any new funds are spent. Existing funds could also be pooled and services delivered in new ways.

• Community power must be built into the government’s forthcoming Devolution strategy, which starts from the bottom up. The more we can show examples of this working well, the more likely it is to happen.

• Local government and public bodies must play a role in managing any new Levelling-Up funds but need to give more power to local people, following the principle of subsidiarity.

• They and other organisations must do much more to ‘integrate with their communities’ through ‘radical listening’ committed to delivering the changes people want. They need to do this collectively, for example when seeking to co-produce with local people, rather than pursuing separate exercises and atomised approaches.

• There must be investment in new structures, relationships and capacity building to achieve this agenda, perhaps called ‘Neighbourhood Democracy’, and the new structures must have teeth. LEPs are not the answer.

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In more detail

The roundtable was introduced by Laura Seebohm, the Better Way’s convenor in the North, who explained that the issue for discussion was how can we level up in ways that lead to a sharing of power with communities, while also achieving system-wide impact. She said that the Better Way network has been exploring ways of sharing power and we have seen a growing momentum across the North for this, with encouraging examples of radical systemic change. The challenge now is to make sure that, as funding hopefully becomes available, we get the architecture and infrastructure right to place power and money with the right people at the right level. She introduced the four initial speakers who would kick discussion off.

Danny Kruger MP, who has written a report commissioned by the PM on the role of communities and levelling-up, and is also a founding member of a Better Way, said that now was a potential moment for change. Many people had been inspired by the community spirit shown in the first lockdown, and the flexibility shown by the public sector. His report, which reflected ideas gathered widely, called for more investment in social infrastructure and greater community power. The forthcoming Devolution White Paper, although delayed, would be important. He favoured a bottom up model of empowerment: this is not as clear cut as recruiting more mayors but had greater potential. He thought the Better Way principles, which he had helped to draw up, embodied how that should work.

Finally, he said that the more that we can do to show this can work through actual examples, the more likely it is to happen.

Nadine Smith, UK Director of Centre for Public Impact, said that, compared to other countries over the last 20 years, the UK Government had focused on effectiveness but far less so on being legitimate. Other countries which had taken legitimacy more seriously had been better prepared for the pandemic. There are examples of administrations in the UK that had tried to build legitimacy through forms of participative democracy, e.g. in Wigan and Camden, but we haven’t seen a ‘whole mindset shift’ in the UK, she said, even though the New Public Management model was dying on its feet. Government needs to be an enabler, not a controller, and without this the levelling-up agenda would fail. Key focus must be:

• Listening, with investment in feedback loops, eg the Swedish Regional Co-ordinator approach set up after 2008 crash.

• Learning – networks learning together with equity in the relationship.

• Relationships - this requires equity in the relationship and time to build relationships with communities.

Chris Marsh, from Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council and People’s Powerhouse, said that he had 30 years’ experience of translating policy into action on the ground and had seen many initiatives come and go, for example, the New Deal for Communities, Total Place and Opportunity Areas. It was important to learn from the past. Such initiatives were in general characterised by three main truths:

• They were nearly always short term – and not long enough to deliver real change.

• They were mostly top down – what people in Whitehall thought was logical, not what people wanted.

• Didn’t set out to reform the things that are really making people feel powerless.

They did not seek to change local economies or the way in which public services work, but focused on ‘better co-ordination’, with the premise that things are okay as they are, just need to be better run. They did not strengthen voice.

Going forward, he made some suggestions:

• Think about local economies so that they hold wealth in eg social value procurement, as in Preston.

• Rather than ‘community improvement districts’, with greater freedoms and responsibilities to design new models of local social and economic policy, as proposed in Danny Kruger’s report, think of ‘neighbourhood improvement districts’.

• Market failure exists in the public sector, so set up true joint ventures with local communities at the centre. We need to think differently about how we offer support.

• Use asset based approaches – a profoundly different way of delivering.

• Make more use of deliberative and participatory democracy approaches – elected councillors are not enough especially in areas where people need voice the most.

John McCabe, Board member of North East Local Enterprise Partnership, amongst other roles, explained that the timing of roundtable coincided with North East LEP Recovery and Renewal Deal proposal, which they had just put to government, seeking more funding. What shone through was the importance of listening and collaboration, which they had practised in drawing up these ideas. He ran through some of the key points, including a job recovery New Deal and initiatives to create a more connected North East. His overarching point was: now was the time to be unashamedly ambitious – if not now, when?

Jill Baker, from Lloyds Bank Foundation, said she was frustrated by how little change there had been in the last 40 years, with longstanding inequalities still existing and health inequalities growing. She said that there was a lot of money already out there which could be used differently but this wouldn’t happen without ‘breaking a few things’. For this to happen, we need to listen and build relationships with real ‘live people’ and let go of egos and break down silos.

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Ideas from the group

We then broke into groups to discuss the issue. Points given in feedback to the plenary included:

Integrating with communities.

• We spend too much time trying to get organisations integrated, when the real focus must be to integrate organisations with communities. This needs capacity building, a bonfire of outputs and measures, and greater collaboration between multiple funders.

• Organisations also need to join forces so they can jointly co-produce with communities. It is unlikely existing structures will work for them and the end result may be radical change.

Listening which produces results.

• Resources need to be put into radical listening ie listening which has radical results. Too often organisations say they have listened when they haven’t, and you have to listen to what you don’t want to hear and avoid preconceptions.

• Once you’ve listened, you need to connect findings at a local, regional and national level – the Swedish model of regional co-ordination was mentioned again.

Building power in communities.

• Power needs to be given away but do this we need to build trust, create relationships and give people in communities space and time just ‘to be’ and express their own agenda, not ours. This requires a real culture change.

• Public investment is needed in capacity building, for example through community organisers and small charities and other organisations that carry out a connecting role.

• It’s important that power is equally held in a community, which it isn’t often, and help create communities and enable them to come and stay together.

• Local government must be part of the picture in managing any levelling-up fund or other initiatives such as pooled budgets. But they need to work with others and work at listening.

• A new architecture is needed which allows people to collaborate and engage, long term. LEPs are not the answer. All this needs teeth. There was a suggestion that this should be called ‘Neighbourhood Democracy’.

• There was some cynicism about commissions, citizens assemblies etc when time and resource go into the process but nothing comes out.

A Levelling Up Fund

• A national Levelling Up social infrastructure fund would be very welcome, but only if there are devolved budgets. Danny’s report needed to stop half way through at the point where the principles were outlined, and then give power to people to decide.

• We also need to be honest and talk about the impact of austerity when we talk about levelling-up.

 Overall, the message was: we need to be radical – ‘go big or go home’.

Note from Changing Practices Cell 3

Note of a third Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 17 September 2020

SUMMARY

• Putting relationships first in service design and development can be an uncomfortable process, and requires patience, and a willingness of the organisation and its funders to ‘let go’.

• Where there is conflict or a divide between people, this often arises through a power imbalance, and it is important for this to be recognised, and not to ignore the feelings associated with this.  Indeed, to bring about positive change, we need to stimulate behaviour change, not rely on process.

• As well as looking at building in kindness and humanity into services, and at building connection and community, we should also be thinking of organisations as communities in which relationships are nurtured internally as well as externally.

• It is usually easier to build relationship-centred practice locally and on a small scale.  Operating at scale can be more difficult, and it is important to distinguish between unhelpful practices (e.g. tick box exercises) and helpful practices (e.g. providing checklists, encouraging open questions, allowing space for reflection).

• We are interested in the possibility of relationship-based standards – behaviours that promote good relationships - which could be widely applied, and used to help individuals and organisations get better at building good relationships, as well as to get feedback.  It might be more productive, ultimately, to measure success not in terms of outputs or outcomes but in terms of the quality of relationships forged..

• The building of good relationships is emerging as a priority across many of our discussions and in many different contexts and is a critical skill to the creation of connection and community and sharing power, changing organisations and collaborative leadership. 

In our next meeting we will explore in more depth what relationship-based standards might look like, and how they could be introduced.

1.     AIMS OF THE CELL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way includes ideas around changing practices, putting humanity and kindness into services and building connection and community through relationships, not just passive services.  This cell is a working group which will meet several times as an informal think tank, to explore these questions together in some depth, share knowledge and insights, and produce a document to share across our network and beyond.

At the first meeting we’d noted that in COVID-19 new relationships have formed, and new partnerships, and it was suggested that there might be a six months window to blend the best of what we have learned in COVID-19 with the best of what we have been doing in the past. We also noted that building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state.

At the second meeting, we discussed the transformative power of self-help groups, and how we need to move away from the model that sees people as consumers of services, which assumes that charities and other providers are there to fix people’s problems, towards creating relationships between people where they can support each other and fund their own solutions.  We also asked ‘What If’ local authorities and others were to act less as gatekeepers and more as enablers or facilitators of relationship and community building, and the focus of our third meeting was to consider this question in more depth.

2.     OPENING PRESENTATIONS

We started the meeting with two presentations:

Alison Pike, from Mencap, explored how organisations can develop relationships to provide better support for those they serve.  At Mencap, a priority area for the charity has been early intervention, giving families and children with a learning disability the best start in life, and they decided that in Newham in East London they would adopt a community-led approach, based on principles of empowering families, empowering communities, and working alongside local services and decision-makers.  The starting point was building relationships with families in the area, to understand what they were feeling as they supported their child from 0-7 years and what good might feel like, rather than pre-empting a service solution.  This led to a shared vision and purpose.  Then an asset-mapping exercise was carried out, to find out what already existed. A series of multi stakeholder conversations, in different settings over twelve months, considered what needed to change.  Families involved in some of the early conversations were trained as co-deliverers. 

Alison shared learning from this work to date, including the following

• This way of working can feel uncomfortable.  It takes time, and many people are looking for a quick fix. It is not always obvious at the time how the conversations will lead to improvements. 

• Co-development and co-delivery is essential to reach marginalised groups.  Alison gave an example of a father from the Bangladeshi community, who became a co-facilitator of workshops to develop peer networks, and was able to build relationships in ways which helped to overcome stigma. 

• Don’t underestimate the power of the peer group, Alison advised.  Supporting families to connect to each other can open many doors.

• Taking a strengths-based approach gets relationships off to a positive start.

• Individual facilitators need to be given autonomy and trust.  The organisation, and its funders, need to be willing to let go.  When things go wrong, there needs to be honest reflection.

Asif Afridi, from equality organisation Brap, talked about how to repair relationships which were not working well and how to bring people together who in some way are apart.  He spoke about the importance of feelings and emotions, especially where relationships are felt to be unequal.

He was a panel member of the independent Civil Society Futures inquiry, which heard from many people that they experience the relationship between state and civil society inquiry as a very unequal and unsatisfactory one.  However, this was rarely acknowledged.  Feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency were ignored or washed over.  The things which have prevented growth and maturity in the relationship, Asif said, are not procedural, e.g. length of consultation periods, but largely behavioural and attitudinal.  This includes, for example, a lack of trust, failure to recognise diversity of the sector, favouritism, preference for certain forms of communication, and lack of honesty about where power lies. 

There are ways to address this, such as showing respect, displaying kindness, recognising bias, developing awareness of power and privilege; understanding that rank in a relationship can affect the content of the feedback received; and taking the time to contact people if a decision didn’t go their way and explaining why.

The PACT framework, as set out on the Inquiry report, helps people consider their behaviours in terms of Power, Accountability, Connection and Trust. However, these relationship issues are often treated as not important, or excuses are made that there is not the time or the resources to do this well. We need a set of clear behavioural prompts or standards, Asif suggested, which characterise an equitable and respectful relationship between civil society and government.  This should be more than a voluntary sector compact.  It should be based on measurable behaviours, with perception-based indicators (e.g. how much trust is there in the relationship), and capable of easy reporting, allowing measurement at a national level and becoming an indicator of our democratic health.

The Better Way has pointed to the benefits of community-driven decision- making.  But a lack of power can be experienced on all sides.  We all need to work on our discomfort, recognising our own privilege and power, and the impact that has on our relationships.  Lack of awareness of power is often a core foundation of conflict.

When we rely on external sources of power, when we depend on others to make us powerful, when we don’t have a good sense of self-esteem, and a strong internal vocation, purpose, and drive, we react when the external power is withheld, and lash out.  Instead we need to develop our own personal internal sources of power, and recognise our reactions when we are in a low rank situation. 

Moreover, those who are in a situation of relative power often feel they are expected to act as heroes.  But it would be better if they were to admit limitations, to accept vulnerability, to act with humility.

So, if we want to build better relationships, we should pay more attention to feelings and emotions, become more aware of power in the relationship, and put our faith in behaviour change, not in process.

3.     DISCUSSION

Participants broke into smaller groups to consider ‘what if’ the state and others including charities were to focus on building relationships rather than delivering services.  Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

RELATIONSHIPS AND GOVERNMENT PRACTICE

We need to encourage government and others to move to behaviours that are more relational and less transactional.  For example, in several urban neighbourhoods, local authorities have introduced traffic restricting measures to reduce pollution and accidents and improve quality of life. They were surprised when residents protested against this. But no-one had talked to them about what they felt, and what they wanted.  Consultation exercises, asking for reactions to specific proposals, are rarely of much value. Much more open questions are needed.  So, relationship standards would need to consider the quality of the conversation, the quality of co-production.

Naming relationship-building roles within public sector bodies or other institutions, as suggested at our previous meeting, would not necessarily be helpful, it was felt, because that immediately establishes a hierarchy. 

VEHICLES TO ENCOURAGE RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

We can establish vehicles that encourage better relationship building.  For example, in the field pf public sector procurement, it is possible to establish an alliance framework for commissioners and providers, making the relationships more equal, as has been demonstrated in Plymouth.

ORGANISATIONS AS COMMUNITIES

Moreover, we can see our own organisations as a ‘conscious community’, seeking out the strengths and assets available across the organisation , cultivating strong relationships within the organisation as well as without, and encouraging people to bring their ‘whole person’ to work.  This could lead to self-managed teams, supported though coaching, as an alternative to a hierarchical management structure, and these teams were likely to be better at forming relationship based-services.

RELATIONSHIPS AND SYSTEMS

We considered whether systems (including sets of rules and procedures) inevitably corrupt relationships. We recognised that systems are made up of humans, and the task therefore is to shorten the distance between people in a system.  And that includes sharing power and building agency for people within the system, as well as believing in reciprocity, i.e. that everyone has something to offer to other people.

RELATIONSHIPS AND SCALE

Does operating at large scale always drive out humanity in relationships?  In our discussion we felt that scale per se is not necessarily the problem. Indeed, people do want to feel they are part of, or connected to, something bigger. The real problem is that operating at scale is too often accompanied by doing things by rote, according to a standardised script, together with a tick-box culture, and this produces transactional rather than relational behaviours, which are intended to bring about efficiency, but fail to respond to human complexity. 

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be like that, and we noted that checklists, in contrast to tick-boxes, can be incredibly useful, as tools for experts, walking them through the key steps in any complex procedure, as set out by Atul Gawande in The Checklist Manifesto, and become part of a virtuous cycle. 

So, not least when operating at scale, it is important we felt to understand the difference between setting narrow targets and doing things by rote (likely to be unhelpful), and making good use of checklist prompts, and providing a framework for reflective practice (likely to be helpful).

RELATIONSHIP STANDARDS AND MEASUREMENT

We considered how to approach the measurement of relationships and develop the skill of forming good relationships.  We noted that, at a policy level, so-called hard outcomes and value for money considerations have become the dominant measures, and these pay little if any attention to relationships.  But it would be valuable if, for example, we could measure what communities or individuals feel about relationships they have with the services they encounter rather than simply their satisfaction with the prescribed outputs.

However, the introduction of measures that assess the quality of relationships is something which would need to be undertaken with great care, some felt, not least because asking questions of people and collecting data from them about their behaviours is never a wholly neutral exercise.  The act of measuring relationships always has an effect on the relationships themselves, and therefore there is a responsibility to ensure that any effect is a positive one. The Outcomes Star methodology, when applied well, can have a positive effect, it was suggested, as well as questions designed to reinforce a positive direction of travel, for example, asking people whether they feel there are others who rely on them, rather than asking whether they reply on other people. 

It was noted that in counselling, relationship health-checks have been found to be useful. The strength of a relationship can come from a combination of positive factors, such as a shared vision, being able to let go of power, acting as a facilitator, building trust. These could perhaps become the foundations of a widely applicable relationships set of standards, capable of both assessing and encouraging healthy relationships.

4.     FINAL REFLECTIONS

David Robinson, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, mentioned that the Relationships Project is developing a ‘heat-map’ to try to understand what relationships are forming and how well they are working in the pandemic. 

He noted that we tend to be more confident about building better relationships and addressing power imbalances when operating at local level on a relatively modest scale, but that the task feels much more difficult when we seek to work at a bigger scale.  It would be useful to explore this further, he felt.  He also said that it may not be possible to systematise relationships, but that it should be possible to make systems more relational.

Caroline Slocock noted that a set of similar principles seems to be emerging from various Better Way discussions.  Across many different types of relationships (between government and civil society, between commissioners and those being commissioned, between service providers and service users, for example) agencies need to start thinking of themselves as enablers and facilitators, rather than gatekeepers, they need to really listen and develop trust and build relationships, and they need to develop a shared vision, understanding the assets that are already there and building from those, rather than intervening to fix things. 

Maybe, she suggested, we should seek to move to a place where the important outputs of our work are not service or other activities we deliver, but rather the relationships themselves.  We could be so much more creative, she said, if we could pursue relationships in all aspects of our work, and think of organisations as a community, and society as a collaboration, and behave as human beings first and foremost in the work we do.

Relationship-based standards, it was felt, could be aspirational, enabling us to build from the bottom up, as a way to organise and deliver things better.

5.     NEXT MEETING

We agreed that it would be useful to meet again, and that the topic for the next meeting would be relationship-based standards. 

The date of the next meeting is Thursday October 22, from 3.00pm to 4.30pm.

Relevant blog: Organisations as Communities by Ben Collins

Note from Sharing Power Cell 3

Summary of key points

• We heard how one organisation is fundamentally reviewing their practices, examining their data, and considering how they can apply their resources and influence in ways that achieve a fundamental shift in power in society and in their own services for those they work with.  Another told us how they were taking advantage of an increased interest by residents in their community to build agency (purpose, belonging, power).

• Other organisations will also be reviewing how they work in the light of Covid-19 but change will require determined leadership, and new tools, including use of data, better frameworks for co-production and for accountability.  It’s important agencies don’t undermine and disempower community building by temporarily parachuting volunteers in from outside.

• While COVID-19 has highlighted the power of community and connection, some groups of people have become even more isolated, unheard and/or under-served, and some have effectively been silenced, eg prisoners confined to their cells without access to support. We need to do more to highlight this loss of power. 

• A discussion about inequality can allow everyone to talk about their own experience of power and privilege, and when they have felt themselves to be at a disadvantage. This type of discussion can lead to profound change.

• We need to move away from extraction (where those in positions of relative power exploit others for their own ends) towards investment (where we support people and organisations to become more powerful, in their own right).

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In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell, the third in a series of meetings.  She explained that the aim was to share insights with each other and inspire each other to do more, and that we would share learning from these discussions with the wider network and beyond. 

Our Better Way Call to Action pointed out that power is in too few hands, and sharing power is one of the ways to redress that.  Many of our Better Way discussions are pointing towards the importance of giving people authentic voices and platforms, through a process of what has been described as radical listening. At our first meeting Sue Tibballs, the thought-leader for this cell, reminded us that although power is concentrated in too few hands and formal institutions including government do have enormous power, we have more power than we think, and so a key question is how to mobilise that. In our second meeting Whitney Iles described the value of reflective practice when bringing lived experience into organisations and policy making, working genuinely together, not labelling people, putting aside preconceptions. 

This time we want to explore how, as organisations are shifting in COVID-19, reviewing their strategies and structure, they do so in ways which share power better.  We started with two presentations:

Sonya Ruparel from Turn2us pointed out that during COVID-19 power imbalances have increased and the charity’s data is showing that financial hardship has become worse for those who were already marginalised before COVID-19, including many Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic people, many disabled people, and many women.  The data also reveals that Turn2u distributed £1.3m in emergency grants in eight weeks, and while people from BAME backgrounds received 35% of the grants, they were also less likely to be successful in their applications.  The charity is seeking to understand why this happened and how that bias can be addressed in future. 

Examination of the data has driven a stronger sense of urgency in Turn2us, to consider how to use its own power more responsibly, and not reinforce power imbalances in grant making and partnership formation for example.  Turn2us is now working towards co-designing a framework for co-production.  This will set out where, when, and how the charity should and must work with experts by experience. Sonya noted that in the crisis it has been easier to engage users in co-production, and that Zoom has been a good leveller. 

Turn2us only exists because of power imbalances in society, Sonya said, and there is no good reason why people should have insufficient money to live on in the UK, and so the charity seeks to use its programme work and the relationships it holds to demand systemic change. Sometimes power is invisible and is visible only in the violence which is done to people’s lives, but it can be revealed through data analysis.  So Turn2us is introducing a power analysis and policy and advocacy objectives in all its programmes, working with lived experts.  It is also designing an accountability framework for the whole organisation, to enable service users to hold the charity to account, to deliver what it says it will deliver, and to use its resources and power responsibly, listening and learning from feedback, and responding. 

As we learn to share power, Sonya said, we need to learn how to hold ourselves to account, and enable others to hold us to account, and have the humility to accept where we need to  change what we do, how we work, and who we work with.

Tom Neumark, from the Peel in Clerkenwell, explained the organisation’s vision to build community connections in a neighbourhood, which is very mixed but where there has not always been a lot of mixing.  The Peel aims to build ‘agency’ among local people, that is, the ability to shape the context of one’s life. 

Tom quoted Jon Alexander, who has described agency as ‘purpose and belonging and power’, and he described the varied experiences in Clerkenwell, both positive and negative, in the pandemic: 

• Purpose:  In COVID-19, as with many other neighbourhoods, there was an upsurge in community volunteering, mutual aid and participation.  At the height of the lockdown 300 meals a week were donated by local restaurants and delivered by residents to people who were self-isolating.  But for many their sense of purpose was shaken, with a lot of people searching for something else in their lives.  And some were far too concerned with immediate pressing difficulties in their own lives to think beyond this.

• Belonging:  Clerkenwell was a dormitory neighbourhood for many of its residents, who go elsewhere for work and leisure.  But in the pandemic that changed, and suddenly the neighbourhood assumed much more significance.  Some people connected with their neighbours more and their sense of belonging increased.  But for others the day to day routine in the neighbourhood has been severed, and the sense of belonging has been under strain.

• Power:  the Peel has been giving practical guidance for people who want to make something happen, in effect taking power into their own hands. For example a ‘bake and take’ initiative, where residents meet on line, bake something at the same time, and deliver it to a neighbour.  But rules about how people can meet each other, use streets, and so on, are imposed quickly and change frequently, and this can produce a feeling of dislocation and powerlessness.  New relationships had between mutual aid groups and the council but at the same time there is a tendency in the council to seek to formalise mutual aid activity, and this has resulted in resistance from those who don’t want to be turned into a service. 

• So, the Peel as an organisation has been trying to redirect its resources to become a platform for those who have felt a loss of purpose, belonging, and power.  It is learning to ask ‘what do you want to achieve and how can we meet you there?’ rather than expecting people to fit into processes set by the Peel.  The organisation is also training local people to act as radical listeners, so that they can help to catalyse activity which comes from residents themselves.

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Breakout sessions

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss these topics further. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

Shifting power in organisations

• There are many example of positive practice, but many agencies are a long way behind. Some organisations still want to be seen as powerful in themselves.  Big ‘oil tanker’ charities and public sector agencies will not achieve the turnaround needed without radical rethinking and redistribution of power, not just to those with lived experience and clients/beneficiaries, but also within the organisation itself.  

• Moreover, there are some big structural problems in the charity sector. A lot of charities still operate according to benevolent and paternalistic models developed in the Victorian era. We expect charity boards to be unpaid, but this results in less Board diversity among charities than among FTSE100 companies. 

• COVID has shown that large institutions can act at speed when necessary, but this requires leadership from the top. If the CEO and chair are not up for change, nothing will happen. It was suggested that those in leadership roles should consider what they control, what they influence, and what is beyond their influence and control. They can also reflect on their ability to bring about personal, interpersonal, organisational and societal change.

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Voices that have been silenced

• It’s a dangerous time.  Many young people in particular are looking for security and certainty but feel things are out of their control, and are feeling powerless.   Many people feel that things are not right, but that they don’t have a voice, and are not listened to, or when they are it is only as part of a tick-box exercise.  

• Furthermore, in the pandemic, many people have remained unheard and/or under-served.  What is happening in prisons is silent, invisible, not covered in media, kept out of sight and out of mind.  Because prisoners are being kept in isolation, groups working with them have been unable to visit and represent them properly.  There are others who in different ways, have also found themselves effectively silenced, including for example, Gypsy and Romany communities, those experiencing domestic violence, and the families of patients with Do Not Resuscitate notices. There needs to be more concerted efforts to tell these stories and also data can be powerful in revealing where these power imbalances lie and where they have got worse.

• When people are heard, those working in policy and media roles need to consider their responsibility to work with people in ways which do not ‘strip people’s stories from them.’

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Addressing inequality

• Many organisations have introduced EDI (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion) strategies. Some in our discussion felt that these were ineffective, especially when they categorise people according to protected characteristics groups, with the implication that one group of people has power and another group is a victim. A few people might be placed on Boards or appointed to other leadership roles, but this can be tokenistic, and deeper problems remain.  Some less visible forms of inequality, including class, are largely ignored, and EDI strategies often fail to address intersectionality, and the reality that different forms of power (or the absence of it) can be experienced by everyone, to some degree. 

• It was suggested that a discussion about inequality can be a good way to begin, because it can allow everyone to talk about their own experience of power and privilege, and when they have felt themselves to be at a disadvantage. This type of discussion can be the start of more profound change.

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Shifting power at community level

• Some areas have experienced persistent disadvantage and social inequality, over many years, despite considerable spending on regeneration and renewal programmes. This was largely because those programmes focused on individual deficits, and failed to share power, or even ask people what they really wanted.

• In the pandemic the community response came first, then the more formalised voluntary sector, then the state.  This has produced a greater respect for community activity, and a desire for more porous boundaries between informal and formal action. 

• But not all community activity in COIVID-19 produced a positive shift in power. Where people offered their services as volunteers, well-meaning, often white middle-class people often became involved, sometimes from outside the area, and this could be disempowering and/or undermine the community building that comes through genuine mutual aid.  Some even started to tell other people what they should be doing, even what they should be eating, in ways which were very disempowering.

• We need to stop talking about disadvantaged communities, as if the people who live in the communities are the problem, and require outsiders to sort things out for them.

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A need for change in the benefits system

• Across the public and social sector there is a pervasive inequality between those who are employed and receive a salary, and those who are unemployed and on benefits and only, at best, receive a voucher for their work.  There is a need to change the system so that it is possible to reward contributions without disrupting benefits. It was pointed out that ten years ago a coalition of charities called for a community allowance which would provide a benefits disregard for people carrying out paid part-time community work, but this was ultimately blocked by senior DWP officials and Ministers.  It may be time to revive this campaign, or something equivalent.

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Political education

• Many people don’t only want to tell their story. They also want an opportunity to work with others on the solutions.

• That means developing an understanding of how the system works, and carrying out a power analysis.  This can include an understanding of how invisible power can operate, through ideas and beliefs which can be a force for progressive change but which can also produce harm.

• Listening exercises therefore need to be accompanied by political education, if we wish to see a democracy which in which true sharing of power can take place.

Sue Tibballs, thought leader for this Better Way cell, shared some closing reflections.  COVID19, she said, has had disruptive effects, for good and for bad. Central government has provided massive injections of state funding to support people and businesses.  Local government has looked afresh at local charities and community groups, devolving more responsibility to them, asking them to step in.

For some people it has felt that their power to act and to make a difference has been growing. But as we head in the discussion many people have lost power, become more isolated, even silenced.   

In the coming period, civil society will need to renegotiate relationships between those operating at different levels, e.g. people (as service users, donors, volunteers), the local voluntary and community sector, and the national voluntary and community sector.

We will need, Sue said, to make sure that the work we do moves away from ‘extraction’ where organisations are taking what they can use from people with lived experience, or where big organisations are exploiting small organisations. Instead, we need to find ways to practice ‘investment’ , and this will include helping the people we work with to understand how power operates, creating opportunities for them to be active in pursuit of greater power.

Caroline Slocock concluded by saying that it was good that the power of connection and community was increasingly being celebrated by politicians and others but we must do what we can to also highlight the isolation and loss of power of certain groups, despite the upsurge in mutual aid.

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Next meeting

The group thanked Grace Wyld who has supported its work, and who is moving on from the Sheila McKecknie Foundation. 

The group also agreed it would be useful to continue to meet. Themes could include:

• Developing the accountability framework

• Understanding sources of power

• Documenting the loss of power

• Changing the narrative of power

Caroline encouraged participants in the cell to suggest further ideas and also to contribute blogs on the topics we have been discussing.  The date of the next meeting is 28 October, 3-4.30 pm.

Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 3

Summary of key points

Successful collaborations require good relationships, a shared vision, shared principles, shared behaviours and shared infrastructure, e.g., workforce development, and need to be enabling and facilitative, to adapt through learning and work to shared targets.

• This is very different from co-operation or partnerships.  Everyone has to be involved in developing the shared purpose and has to work together to achieve it.

• Personal and relationships and behaviour can make or break collaborations, and need to be actively nurtured. 

• Shared infrastructure needs to be developed. Behavioural standards and joint leadership training can play a role, and shared language, values and principles and information are also important.

• Shared leadership requires a change of culture and systems: engaging with end users through deep listening; involving front line staff, not just the top teams, in designing change; creating time and space for imagination about future possibilities; moving away from organisational plans with pre-determined goals; and different commissioning and procurement arrangements

In more detail

Steve Wyler, Co-convenor of a Better Way, said that some clear messages had emerged from the previous meeting, which had looked at how to sustain change when a leader moved on:

• A clear, shared purpose across organisations which has become part of the culture is important.

• A focus on the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, helps sustain that sense of purpose, and they need to be engaged and their voices heard. 

• Relationships are very important too, and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.

• Lasting change only happens through distributive or shared leadership, and change becomes more embedded when leaders stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’. 

• Great leadership is also about enabling others. 

• Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.

He said that this time we were looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice, and introduced Dawn Plimmer from Collaborate as our main speaker.

Dawn said that Collaborate work with many place-based collaborations and often work with local authority partners.  Complexity is their starting point: no one individual or organisation can address an issue alone and systems, not organisations come first.  The collaborations they were involved in often have a geographical dimension and are seeking solutions at local level.  It was important to put people first, not services. Collaborations are a long journey, she said, and can be challenging:  there is often a ‘fox and chicken’ wariness between commissioners and those funded, for example.

 She identified the following conditions for success

• Relationships

• Shared vision

• Shared principles

• Shared behaviours

• Shared infrastructure, eg, workforce development.

The features of collaborative or systems leadership are:

• It’s personal: ‘start with our own capacity, appetite and commitment for challenge’

• Relationships and trust are key, which is why the most effective local action on Covid-19 took place where these existed.

• A shared purpose must be developed.

• Enabling and facilitating.

• Adaptive, constantly reflecting, learning and finding new truths.

• It’s about delivering shared results, with clear roles.

Today’s collaborators are pioneers towards what will hopefully become the new normal.

Covid-19 had galvanised the system, she said, and put an emphasis on trust and empathy, and the crisis had helped to turbo charge relationships and helped people to work beyond boundaries.  The challenge now was to stop reverting to the old model, after the end of the crisis.

In discussion about what makes a good quality collaboration in practice, key points included:

The difference between collaboration, partnerships and co-operation

• The key to shared leadership and collaboration is to ‘leave the lanyards at the door’.  There had been many earlier attempts at collaboration, for example Local Strategic Partnerships, Our Place and Community Planning, but many so-called collaborations are just tick box exercises and unequal ‘partnerships’. 

• In partnerships, partners often start working together by signing up to a pre-determined agenda.  Collaboration can only flourish where there is no set agenda and a shared purpose can be developed together. 

• As one person in the group put it, co-operation is where everyone is working alongside each other toward a number of independent goals to achieve particular targets.  ‘In contrast,’ she said, ‘collaboration is where a group are working collectively toward a shared goal, parking the business of their particular organisation.  In collaboration, rather than exchanges of information and resources, team members share, no-one pulls ahead of the pack and the success of each individual depends on the success of all.’

The importance of behaviours

• To be successful, you need to ‘get the right people on the bus’ and work with people to make sure that everyone is on board.  Behaviours are often the reason why collaborations failed to lead to systems leadership.  People are not intentionally blocking, but can dig in behind entrenched positions, seeing change as criticism of what they have achieved. 

• Facilitation techniques with open-ended questions and the limitation of dominant voices can help.  OPERA is one technique designed to create a functional meeting that is quick, efficient, and inclusive. OPERA stands for OWN, PAIR, EXPLAIN, RANK, and ARRANGE.  Participants start with their own suggestions by writing down their ideas.  Next, they are grouped into pairs to discuss their best suggestions.  The best ideas are explained and shared with the whole group followed by a ranking of the proposals.  Finally, similar ideas are arranged into groups.   

A focus on users, not organisations

• A focus on users can help break through entrenched organisational positions and is an important starting point for creating a shared sense of purpose.  Deep listening is important, with an open-ended agenda.  We heard of one example where families were brought in and asked, ‘What would good look like?’  Another example was where policy makers in senior roles held late night sessions with rough sleepers in what became deeply personal encounters, and this made a big difference for a while.

Shared infrastructure, including behavioural standards and shared language

• Shared infrastructure can help to break down organisational boundaries and culture.

• Cross-sector training is one element.  There need to be shared learning spaces. 

• Shared language is important.

• Shared values and principles are important.  Behavioural standards might also play a role.  For example, respect for each other rather than judging, recognising the value different partners can bring, curiosity, and not being risk averse.  

• Some shared governance might be needed.

A change in culture and systems

• Commissioning and procurement and funding can be a block to systems leadership and must be addressed.

• Organisational strategies and planning can create inflexibility and be a block. We heard of one example where a major organisation is trying to move away from 5 year strategies with clear plans and trying to align instead around common purpose and principles.

• To create a shared sense of purpose, it helps to imagine the future you want to see together, setting aside the practicalities, as set out here by Robert Hopkins, the founder of the Transitions Town Movement, and author of From what is to what if.  He says using imagination needs time and space and for us not to feel under constant surveillance.

• There needs to be an organisational shift to focus on people.  Part of systems leadership is to give permission to the front line to become systems leaders.  The principles for collaboration can be agreed at a high level but change can only be achieved by front-line staff. 

• Participatory budgeting is a useful technique and one we might explore in further discussions.

 Reflecting on the discussion, Cate Newnes-Smith, the thought leader for the group, said she would particularly take away the thinking on shared infrastructure, including shared information, shared language and behaviour.  Steve Wyler agreed that shared infrastructure was important and that there were very few good examples of cross-sectoral infrastructure at present.

Note from Changing Organisations Cell 2

Second meeting of the Better Way ‘Changing Organisations’ cell, 8th September 2020 

1.      SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

We heard how different organisations are attempting to practise radical listening, from small community organisations to large national charities and local authorities.  Their experience suggests that the following are essential elements:

• Small scale conversations, often one-to-one, where those in a leadership or management role hold themselves back from problem-solving , and instead create a social space for people as service users and citizens to talk about what really matters to them, and using this to inform what the organisation does.

• Moving away from centrally-conceived organisational plans and targets towards a shared set of guiding principles, which allow for maximum adaptability and responsiveness at the front-line.

• Making time for everyone to practice radical listening, as a core activity.

At our next meeting we will consider how to make more of this happen, and in particular the role of Boards, and of local authorities.

2.      IN MORE DETAIL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, explained that this was a second meeting to explore further the Better Way Call to Action theme of ‘changing organisations to focus on communities and solutions’, and in particular putting those we serve first, listening to and reflecting them in everything we do. 

In our first meeting Karin Woodley had described her experience of radical listening at Cambridge House, creating informal spaces with an open agenda for people to talk about the things that matter to them and develop the work of the organisation accordingly, as well as changing the composition of staff and volunteers to become more like the community served. 

Caroline noted that radical listening is difficult, but seems to be central to many elements of Better Way thinking, including sharing power, and changing the narrative, as other Better Way cells have been exploring.  So in this our second meeting we want to explore further the ‘essence’ of radical listening.  Caroline introduced our two speakers:

MARGARET ADJAYE, CEO OF THE UPPER NORWOOD LIBRARY HUB

Margaret described how she spends time with service users who come to the Library Hub, having informal conversations, asking how they are feeling, what is going on in their lives, what is not right, what could be improved. 

The Library Hub provides various well-being as well as library and learning services, and support for enterprise start-up. Many of the Hub activities have emerged from ‘nuggets’ of informal conversation, not from formal consultation exercises. For example a chat over an hour or two with an elderly lady, who was isolated and lonely, led to a very popular ‘tea and tech’ service, where around 30 people at a time take refreshments and socialise with others, while also learning how to use computers. 

Margaret is also the convenor of the national Community-Managed Libraries Peer Network.  During COVID-19 many of the 480 people in that network have been calling Margaret, looking for help, and sharing ideas about how to maintain or adapt their service and support their local community. 

In Margaret’s experience it is the incidental and one-to one discussions that matter most, whether in the library space, on the phone or on Zoom, hearing stories, sharing sorrows, and celebrating together.  

Radical listening, she said, depends a lot on the listener, as a person, being humble enough, and having the time to sit down and talk to people, to hear what they say and respond accordingly.  If it is not possible to deliver what people are looking for, then it is important to say so, but when it is in the listener’s gift or power, then it becomes possible to work with people to make something worthwhile happen.

FRANCES DUNCAN, CEO OF THE CLOCK TOWER SANCTUARY (CTS) IN BRIGHTON

The CTS works with young people in crisis, to avoid them becoming part of the long term homeless population.  The following diagram describes the opportunities the CTS is developing for young people to have a voice, with the timeline showing the time it may take to reach that point.

As the diagram shows, the work begins with individual self-expression, to help young people understand what the CTS does, understand more about themselves, and express themselves (in positive or less positive ways) about what they want and what they need. Sometimes what young people say is uncomfortable to listen to.  The interactions depend on trust and an enabling environment, and at the CTS, young people do not need to ‘jump through hoops’ to receive services.

The blue oval in the diagram includes the stage when young people are encouraged to influence what the organisation does internally and includes a ‘wall of words’ where the things that they say are placed, to bring about internal change.  They’ve found that one to one consultation and residential awaydays work better than a ‘client council’. 

The green oval shows how they hope young people work will with the CTS in presenting to external audiences, at forums and conferences, or by acting as mentors, running their own workshops, creating a film, telling their own stories (not CTS stories), meeting with funders and corporate partners.

Finally,  the orange section indicates how, as a small team with limited expertise and capacity,  the CTS works with others, pulling in expertise from elsewhere.

Frances mentioned that Karin Woodley’s essay on radical listening in the Better Way Insights collection became a blueprint for revolutionising the way her organisation engages with young people. This included enabling staff to have more time for listening, and over half of the staff and Board now have experience of issues the young people face. Frances believes that placing young people on the CTS Board would be tokenistic at best, but Board members are all expected to spend some time as frontline volunteers in the organisation as part of their induction. The CTS tries to build an atmosphere where staff and volunteers and the Board feel able to challenge the organisational status quo, and, for example, young people are invited to suggest the training needs of staff.  This had taken time, as it involved a change of culture.

Because CTS are not paid by results linked to specific outcomes, CTS are able instead to use guiding values developed in discussion with those the young people they worked with, the first of which is that the people we serve come first, and they used these as a checklist against which they continuously judge what they do.

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Breakout sessions were then held to consider further the essence of radical listening. In the following discussion participants made the following points:

• SOCIAL SPACES CAN GENERATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR LISTENING

It is important to provide a ‘social space’, a version of ‘home’ which feels safe where unplanned and unexpected conversations can happen. The Upper Norwood Library Hub, for example, has a community bar, and a theatre, and these provide a space for people to come together and to socialise, and from this many other things can emerge. 

• PEOPLE ARE NOT ‘HARD TO REACH’, IN A ONE-TO-ONE DISCUSSION

There are many people who appear ‘hard to reach’ because they don’t want to engage in formal consultation exercises but they can be engaged in one-to-one discussions in an informal setting.  And that can lead to services that are truly accessible, and valued, and used by all parts of a community to a much greater degree. 

• LEADERS MUST BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY

People in leadership roles need to move away from problem-solving and instead model radical listening, by simply sitting and listening, not summing up, not providing leading questions, not fitting what people say into some preconceived notion of what they want to do. Leaders need to shut up, listen from beginning to end, and let people finish what they are saying.

Action which shows people have been heard and what is changing has to follow. Sometimes this means listening to and acting on things which appear less important to managers, at least to start with, and remembering ‘it’s not about me’ – what feels important to service users is important.  Two examples were given of people being consulted asking for better quality toilet paper, or wanting more teaspoons in the  kitchen area.  There’s also a deeper message there: people want the place to feel more like their home, and less like an institution.

Leaders also need to be willing to have a more honest conversation with funders and commissioners. Otherwise, the decisions about what should be done are set by funders and cascaded down through organisations, and what the users actually want is disregarded.

• ORGANISATIONS NEED TO ALLOW TIME FOR RADICAL LISTENING

It can sometimes feel as if radical listening can only happen in ‘stolen moments’, a guilty diversion from real work. But radical listening, for managers and for frontline staff, is the real work. Without it, everything else will fail to produce true value.  It does take time, but this is time that is well spent.

• RADICAL LISTENING REQUIRES A SHIFT AWAY FROM PLANS AND TARGETS TOWARDS PRINCIPLES

Some organisations are attempting to change the way they operate, with a different theory of change.  This includes moving away from centralised planning and control and targets towards a set of core principles (which act as ‘strategic anchors’ or ‘guiding lights’) that encourage greater local autonomy, including self-managed teams, with the intention that the people they support should be at the centre of decision making. 

• EVERYONE HAS A CONTRIBUTION TO MAKE

In order to develop good strategy the conversation needs to involve everyone, service users, staff and Board, where possible drawing out shared experience. 

• STATUTORY ORGANISATIONS NEED TO MOVE TO HUMAN SCALE LISTENING

For those working in a statutory setting it can be especially difficult to move beyond formalised ways of operating, and practice radical listening.  In Northern Ireland community infrastructure is well developed and community planning is enshrined in legislation but, in a society that remains divided in many ways, it is not easy to reach common agreement, and some voices remain unheard. Community Foundation Northern Ireland has introduced a deliberative democracy programme, and it was suggested that informal contact with citizens on a smaller scale (whether in person or online) allows a greater level of interaction and understanding, and can be more productive  than larger scale exercises which can become de-personalised and can reinforce division.

Note from Changing the Narrative Cell 3

Summary of key points

• Neoliberalism had been founded on a narrative based around values and a values-based approach would be needed to counteract it.

• We should be more confident in appealing to the values of benevolence and universalism and should not try and adjust our messages to people’s different values.

• Our narrative needed to be a dialogue with the public and different groups with it, authentically connecting with them and highlight authentic experiences and voices.

In more detail

Steve Wyler, Co-convenor of a Better Way, began by recapping on some of the main points from previous meetings:

• The current national narrative can ‘other’ people and portray them as part of the problem, and organisations which seek to help them can inadvertently do this too.

• Creating platforms for authentic voices who frame their own story can help disrupt existing narratives and shift power, and organisations can help by linking these stories to systemic issues and solutions as well as individual stories.

• The new narrative we’d like to create will portray people as part of the solution, not the problem and, as part of this, we need to tell a different story of responsibility to each other, mutual obligation and caring for each other, as well as highlight the need for systemic change. This needs to appeal to people of different political persuasions if it is to take hold.

He said that the topic of today’s discussion was ‘How do we bring about change’ and introduced our speaker, Tom Crompton, from the Common Cause Foundation, to talk about the role of values in achieving change. 

Tom said that they had created a model of values, drawing on academic work in social psychology and surveys where they had asked people in a hundred countries what they valued in life.  Clear patterns emerged that have strong predictive value, as shown in the ‘map’ below; and the values had been used successfully in communications to influence people to support environmental causes.

These values tend to cluster, with people associating with those adjacent in the map to the one they most identify with.  But they are not static and in practice everyone shares all the values to some degree or other. 

Conventional communications wisdom is that you should ‘speak the language’ of those you want to influence and segment audiences with different messages for each.  But the lesson from their work is that if you draw attention to one value it tends to elevate the recipients attachment to that value.  Experiments have clearly demonstrated a short-term effect but there is probably also a longer term one which has not yet been measured.

So, for example, it is better not to stress economic arguments in relation to the environment or disability issues, even for those who most naturally associate with that value, and more advantageous to use values of universalism and benevolence.

They had also found that an appeal to people’s values cuts through better than campaigns that focus on the head.

He noted that it was common to build out from the values of benevolence to reinforce values around conformity and tradition, with a short step to security, and far less common to build out from benevolence to universalism.  In thinking about shifting the narrative, we could do more of that and with greater confidence.

In breakout groups and the subsequent discussion the following points were made:

• The map was useful to understand what was happening, and we agreed that it was good to speak the language of values, but people in the group wanted to avoid being manipulative. We were not engaged in marketing.

• Sometimes members of the group had found it useful to appeal to the values of different parts of the map, for example, arguments around the economic and personal advantages of equality strategies had gained traction and led to policy change.

• Using values could help people to engage in a conversation to bring about change.  It was important to recognise that the polarisation of left and right did not necessarily reflect people’s values and that people had more values in common than we tend to think.

• Neo-liberalism had been very successful in establishing a narrative based around values on the lower left-hand side of the map and a shift in that narrative also needed to be values based, starting from a different point.

• A radical new narrative was needed focusing on universalism and benevolence and emphasising responsibility, enabling self-direction.

• Our narrative needed to be a dialogue.  One-to-one conversation between people can be the foundation to move into a new more relational narrative space. 

• It was important to tell authentic stories and to listen to the public and what matters to them.  This tended to be things like home, family, place and where they work.

• This dialogue is not the same as focus group politics.  Radical listening skills are required, and discussions with a wide range of people, allowing their agendas to come to the surface, with sufficient trust to allow challenge and criticism to be expressed.

Note from Sharing Power Cell 2

Summary of key points

• Lived experience is powerful in designing and delivering better policies and practices but needs to be used thoughtfully, through ‘reflective practice’ in ways that promote co-creation with professionals and ensure power is genuinely shared.

• Organisations need to provide spaces in which genuine listening can take place in open-ended ways which avoid labelling, harming or exploiting people and which enable them to feedback on the process and find out how their input has been used, and from which everyone involved can learn.

• Staff with lived experience are an important resource but need appropriate support to avoid trauma leaking out into work or being re-traumatised, or burn-out.

• Funders can do more to involve people with lived experience, including making funding available for involvement in pre-project shaping activities, as well as post-project evaluation.

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In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell.  She explained that the aim was to share insights with each other and inspire each other to do more, and that we would share learning from these discussions with the wider network and beyond (for example we had been feeding network insights into the Danny Kruger report for the Prime Minister about the role of civil society). 

 Our Better Way Call to Action pointed out that power is in too few hands, she said, and sharing power is one of the ways to redress that.  At our first meeting Sue Tibballs reminded us that we have more power than we think.  As a result of COVID-19 we might see more division and inequality in society, but there are also opportunities and we see some organisations changing their strategy. 

The topic for this meeting was how we create inclusive conversations that drive change, and what is it about giving up power that makes us so uncomfortable?

Our guest speaker was Whitney Iles from Project 507. This organisation, set up by Whitney in 2011, works in prisons and community settings with young people who are leading lifestyles that are physically, psychologically or emotionally harmful to themselves and others. Project 507 employs people with lived experience and has taken that lived experience and turned it into trauma informed professional practice. It does not see itself as being there to help, more to create a space in which people learn and create together through co-production in a way that benefits everyone and with the aim of people becoming healthy, happy people.

Whitney said that Project 507 also help other organisations and policy makers to make use of lived experience but in doing so it’s important to think what we mean by this and who do we leave out.  We will always miss some voices, some experiences.

She underlined the importance of lived experience for ‘filling in the gaps’ for policy makers and those developing practice, for example in the prison system. Lived experience can be invaluable, not least informing those around the policy table or who put policies into practice who would not otherwise know about the nuances of how things actually work in practice and whether they change lives, or not.  Without this knowledge, the danger is that policies and practices either will not work or actually create harm. 

And there is a big difference between tokenism (using people only for their lived experience, projecting labels on people eg ex-offender or ex-gang member, not ensuring people are emotionally safe and forcing people to disclose, ignoring the risk to the individual, failing to pay for the expertise) and empowerment (opportunities to learn and develop, with agreed labels, roles and job titles, creating reflective space for people to think about how they apply their experience, and providing clinical supervision and other support). Those who are ex-service users can often become overloaded with work and responsibility, and can suffer burn-out. 

Reflection is vital to creating together and the best way to build in lived experience is through ‘reflective practice’ for participants to think about and process their experience, she explained, and this applies to practitioners too – thinking about why they bring young people to the table, what it means for us as ex-service users, including reflecting on the power dynamics in the group.

This should happen throughout and – critically - after the end of work, whether it is changing policy, an event, or practice, as this is an important piece of learning. Did those with lived experience feel heard, are there things that have been learned about working together?  Sharing the learning is sharing the power and helps us to deal with nuances of why we don’t share power in the first place, she said.  This learning should be set out in documents which should be shared and discussed with everyone involved.

Through reflective practice, she concluded, people from different backgrounds and experiences are able to come together and create something that is incredible.

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Breakout sessions

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss these topics further. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

Creating the conditions for better participation

• We need to create listening organisations in which people are heard as people and are truly valued. Framing the question can be problematic so have to start with an open book and provide space for people to speak, without stereotyping.  Spaces where people can relate to each other as people, rather than according to their functional roles, can help to break down power imbalances.

• It is important to see a person as separate from their circumstances. Avoid labels and definition by a particular lived experience.  If you get to know a person it is possible to build the trust that is necessary for inclusive conversations. Attempts to share power become uncomfortable where there isn’t sufficient trust.

• We need to remember that sharing power takes a long time.

• Setting the agenda and an organisation’s strategy is best done with a mix of those who are service users, front line staff, managers and Board members, providing payments for people with lived experiences as well as opportunities to learn and develop. 

• Moving from listening to action – it is important to maintain the dialogue and feedback to build trust and help people understand they have made a contribution.

Involvement of others

• It is important to listen with the right people in the room, but much can also be gained by people connecting to others not in the room, building linking social capital and so sharing power.  

• Often people want to talk about solutions and the systems – can we think about lived experience at a collective level not as heroic individuals?

• We need to trust communities to know what they want and what they want to focus on, rather than impose a truth or theory of change on them, asking them to refine or test it. 

• In COVID-19 we need a blend of expert health professionals, as well as lived public health experience -  things go wrong when one or the other is lacking. 

• If there is sufficient diversity people don’t have to feel grateful that they have been invited in.

• In every meeting it is useful to have an empty chair, and ask the question, who isn’t here?

Managing the tensions within an organisation

• Sharing power implies giving away control, and this comes with risks. 

• Within an organisation there is often a tension between the front line staff, who tend to have a depth of understanding and respect for the people they work with, and fundraising and communication teams who can treat lived experience as a commodity to be applied by the organisation for its own ends. This tension needs to be addressed at senior management or Board level, but rarely is.

• As other Better Way discussions have explored, the dominant model of leadership is highly gendered, with centralising command-and control behaviours, and this needs to be challenged if we are to see more distributed forms of leadership, more conducive to sharing power.

Some pitfalls

• Poverty-pimping is far too common. Staff members who are for example ex-gang members confer credibility and help attract funding for their organisation. As a result organisations often fail to encourage them to move on when they are ready for this.

• Many organisations want their service users to tell their personal stories, but discourage their delivery staff from doing that. In fact, staff may have a great deal of lived experience they could share, and service users could play a much greater role in designing and shaping the delivery of services. 

• Organisations need to consider carefully what support is required. Without therapeutic training, trauma can ‘leak’ into work unproductively and this needs to be managed in a supportive and safe space.

• There are concerns about how co-production is applied.  When a professional has an agenda and gets people with lived experience into a room to design something according to that agendas this is not sharing power – those people might have wanted to design something different.

• What does it mean to be an active ally? When professionals feel they don’t have legitimacy and pass the responsibility to those with lived experience that can do harm. It is tokenistic to think of lived experience as a trump card.   

• The term lived experience is not one some of those in the discussion liked because it is in danger of becoming just another label and we all have lived experience.  It’s better to be more specific about what experience people have. 

What funders can do to help

• Lived experience is in vogue among some funders at the moment. But most still expect applications to come with fully worked out aims and interventions and outcomes, rather than investing in the process of working with a community to establish what these should be. This means that insight from lived experience becomes, in practice, an afterthought.

• Funders could encourage organisations to include post-event reflection, as Whitney described, in their funding bids as a standard feature of the projects they fund.

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Final reflections from Whitney

We need to understand better the intersectionality of gender and race, and avoid designating people in ways which places them in the impossible position of representing whole classes of people.

We have to be ready to do the difficult work, and be willing to give up control and power, however uncomfortable that makes us feel.  In sharing power, and including people with lived experience and these whose voices haven’t been heard, there will be a spectrum of collusion, positive and negative, and many grey areas to navigate.

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Next meeting

Wednesday 16 September, 2.00-3.30pm.

Topic:  As organisational strategies change in the light of Covid-19, how can we use this shift to give more power to people in society?

Note from Changing the Narrative Cell 2

Note of the changing the narrative cell, 21 July 2020

Summary of key points

• A drive for more funding can reinforce problematising narratives but it is possible to tell the story of change in ways that show where the need lies but does not disempower or problematise those who are supported.

• Creating platforms for authentic voices who frame their own story can help disrupt existing narratives and shift power.

• The media can problematise and ‘other’ people but can also be part of the solution – we can help them tell ‘human interest’ stories that show systemic issues and solutions as well as individual stories.

• Individualism is part of the problem.  We need to tell a different story of responsibility to each other, mutual obligation and caring for each other, as well as highlight the need for systemic change. This needs to appeal to people of different political persuasions if it is to take hold.

• Funders can be part of the solution, for example, bringing in people with lived experience to help them make good choices.

Next time we will look in more detail into how to make change happen.

In more detail…

Steve Wyler started the meeting by summarising the key points from the last:

• We want the national conversation to shift from 'them and us' to caring for each other, in which everyone contributes and also has responsibilities.

• We need to create platforms for people to tell stories where they are the heroes, not our services.

• We need to use new language, for example ‘valuable’ not ‘vulnerable’.

He said that at this meeting we were going to focus on the barriers to this kind of narrative and what we can do about them.

Neil Crowther reminded us of some the issues he’d raised previously, including the quote from a school nurse who had heard a boy during lockdown say that he was in school because he was ‘valuable’: that switch from seeing people as ‘vulnerable’ to focusing on their assets was a key shift in the narrative we are seeking.  Other shifts were to hope, not fear, what we stand for, not what we are against, to solutions and opportunities, not threats, and support for everyday heroes.  There is often a significant gap between the dominant narrative now, and the story we want to tell eg ‘social care as a vehicle for a good life’ rather than ‘social care as a destination or a place’.

Neil identified some of the barriers to and challenges for this kind of narrative:

• For charities, fund-raising from the public was perceived to work best when describing problems and the agencies as the saviours.

• Likewise, commissioners, procurers and charitable funders often wanted organisations to demonstrate the problem and show how their investment had solved it.

• Influencing politicians to spend more on social issues often leads campaigners to play up the negatives and to portray services as solution, and in an age of austerity many services were under-funded. 

Duncan Shrubsole then gave his perspective based not just on his current role at the Lloyds Bank Foundation but also as the Chair of Switchback and his 9 years at Crisis.  He agreed that fund-raising was a challenge but added that the best charities do already major on turning lives around, but to get public buy-in they also have to tell the story of the journey individuals have gone through, including the negatives, and they have to show where they add value.  That story had to be told in a humanising, empowering way.  Likewise, when talking about issues with the government, who are trying to target tight resources, it is important that they understand and correctly identify needs.  They have to understand the challenges people face.

There was sometimes a danger, Duncan said, that asset-based narratives reinforce a view that solutions were always in the hands of individuals.  Promoting agency is important but this has to be balanced by also describing and addressing systemic issues that may hold people back. JRF described this a moving away from individual deficits to talking about what is holding people back.  We do need people to be able to express injustice and harm, and for the narrative to identify what is getting in the way and what we can do about it.

Points coming out of the subsequent discussion included:

• Creating platforms for authentic voices changes the narrative. It is important that the stories that are told stay true to people, and that people telling their stories are ‘talking in voice’, not mediated by others.  Genuine voices disrupt the process.  Sometimes charities frame stories in ways that justify what they do, when in fact they are not doing the right thing.  The bigger picture is that people lack power, which is too concentrated in the state and vested interests, and giving people the opportunity to express an authentic voice can disrupt and shift this. Fixers helped people tell their own story in short films, with the framing done by themselves – see below.  Sound Delivery is also providing platforms for lived experience– see below. Sometimes people don’t see value in themselves and lack aspirations or a feeling of agency.  Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire is training the people they work with to become the ‘leaders of the future’.

• Targeting the media. We need to disrupt national narratives in the media and elsewhere which can be ‘othering’, disempowering and problematising.  We should look not to news outlets but also daytime TV and popular magazines. 

• Telling the story of the system, not just the individual. Story-telling is important but it needs not to be just a human interest crisis story, it also needs to show what is wrong with the system in ways that point to solutions. Cathy Come Home is a famous example of how a story could lead to systemic change, in this case the Homeless Act.  JRF is not trying to tell the story of poverty in a deeply human way, for example. 

• Reinventing society. The agenda of individualism underlies the current narrative and in the new framing we need to appeal to people to think beyond themselves and also not look to the state where family or grass roots support in communities might be a better solution. 

• A cross-party narrative of responsibility, caring for each other and mutual obligation. We need a narrative that crosses political divides if it is to take hold.  Responsibility towards each other is part of the narrative of people caring for each other: you step forward to surface and resolve an issue because you want to prevent others from experiencing the same problem.  Responsibility, linked to mutual obligation, is a concept that appeals to people of different political beliefs, whereas appeals for systemic change alone are often perceived as left wing.  Taking responsibility is part of taking control and developing agency. The narrative needs to recognise that people do have choices, sometimes they make the wrong ones and have to take responsibility for that, but the system can also block opportunities or be unfair. 

• Supportive funders.  Funders can be part of the problem, but sometimes they are blamed by charities when it’s not their fault.  Some funders are trying to work in a different way, for example, democratising ways of distributing funds and bringing in people with lived experience to help them make choices.

It was agreed that the next meeting, which is at 3.00 -4.30 pm on 7 September, would focus on the practical dimension of how to change the narrative, and we might explore some specific examples. 

Some relevant links

Fixers – see this blog by Margo Horsley.

Sound Delivery – links kindly provided by Jude Habib below:

• An evaluation of our spokespersons network pilot – funded through crowdfunding and match funded via support from PHF and Lankelly Chase.  We are now in conversations with funders to scale up from the pilot:  https://beingthestory.org.uk/spokesperson-network

• Two people from our network Brenda and Amanda featured on a Radio 4 Documentary – Unchained – about women and the criminal justice system https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hghf

• Being the Story Podcast – This  podcast gives a platform to range of individuals with lived experience of a range of social issues – Think TedTalks for the Social Sector – available on all podcast platforms: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/being-the-story/id1483449674  reflects the work to build confidence, find platforms and encourage visibility for those often not listened to.

Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire.

Note from Changing Practices Cell 2

Note of a second Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 16 July 2020

SUMMARY

• We need to stop thinking of public and charity services as ‘fixing’ people and start connecting people up instead.  This means we see people not as ‘consumers’ of services or ‘beneficiaries’ but as citizens and producers.

• We shared examples where traditional service provision could be shifted towards models of community self-help, which would allow positive relationships to flourish, and which would respond to the needs and circumstances of the whole person.

• There are good examples of this, not least the Self-Reliant Groups supported by WEvolution.

• We need to ‘re-found’ the purpose of local government away from a gatekeeping to a more enabling role. We may also need enabling legislation, such a Community Power of Competence, to encourage a more widespread change in practice.

• There is also a need for different job roles for those working on the public sector, and in the voluntary sector as well, to support this change.

In our next meeting we will explore in more depth what these job roles could look like, and also what might prevent the change we want to see.

1.     AIMS OF THE CELL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way includes ideas around changing practices, putting humanity and kindness into services and building connection and community through relationships, not just passive services.  This cell is a working group which will meet several times, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.

At the first meeting we’d noted that Covid-19 had strengthened some relationships, not least among those involved in local partnerships, and in some cases this has led to greater agency for more people, she said. Online relationships have worked well for some people, but not all. There is a short window in which to embed these changes as we come out of the pandemic, we thought. We also noted that building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state.   

Following on from this, the focus for this meeting was what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships.

2.     OPENING PRESENTATIONS

We started the meeting with two presentations:

Becca Dove, Head of Family Support and Complex Families at Camden Council referred to an article by Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project

What we need to build is the Citizen story, where the role of government is neither all nor nothing, but in between: to equip and enable us, and to partner with us; to share as much information and power as possible, so that we can work together with government and with one another to create a new normal.  …  If you start from there, you don’t try to serve people-as-Consumers, you learn with people-as-Citizens.

So, asked Becca, if we were to see local authorities as public servants and public learners, what could that mean for the relationship with residents?  What if, rather than just recruiting professionals, local authorities were to put as much effort into enabling families to support other families, where the professional’s job was to create the space and provide the support for families to help each other?  In child protection, what if local authorities which currently commission advocacy for the families concerned were to direct their resources to supporting people with lived experience of child protection to advocate for one another?  What if, rather than funding food banks, the role of the local authority was to support residents to create their own food co-ops and shops? And what if, rather than commissioning care packages, the role of adult social care was to find the strengths in residents and honour and strengthen relationships so that people could feel that their next door neighbour was as much there for them as their distant family many miles away?

When we think of residents as consumers, local authorities become, as Jon Alexander has described, branches of a retailer to central government’s head office, where the highest aspiration is to provide services efficiently and ‘cock-up less often’.  But it need not be like that, and local authorities’ relationships with residents can be fundamentally different, Becca believes.

Noel Mathias from WEvolution identified prevailing areas of difficulty, including the following:

• A negative mind-set: Our thinking is dominated by negative mental constructs (‘deprived community’ for example suggests dodgy places, unemployed people, single parents, crime, people on benefits). This need not be the case.  In India for example the term ‘slum’ is associated with ingenious, enterprising and industrious places and people.  But in the UK we tend to divide people into the weak and vulnerable on the one hand, and gatekeepers, regulators and messiahs on the other. This mind-set produces an imbalance in power and an imbalance in equality. 

• A culture of fixing:  Our dominant culture is one of fixing, and this leads to dependency and entitlement.  The benefits system for example is intended to help people, but ends up with people becoming dependent and feeling entitled, and less able to determine their futures themselves.

• Deconstruction of the human person:  If I have a mental health problem, says Noel, this is dealt with by a mental health charity.  But if I am hungry I am passed on to a food bank, if I have a debt problem, I need to go to a debt agency.  Each organisation will claim they are achieving their outcomes, but the person gets left behind.

WEvolution has developed a vehicle to bring about change: self-reliant groups. These are informal groups of people who come together to save small amounts of money, support each other, learn new skills, and become unexpected entrepreneurs.  There are 135 such groups, in Scotland, England, Wales and Holland, and they provide spaces for people, mainly women, to meet, save and create. Some people end up becoming entrepreneurs.  Self-reliant groups produce a series of shifts:

• From simply being a consumer or beneficiary to becoming a producer and citizen;

• From fixing to connecting;

• From being treated in parts to the whole persons being empowered to act on their own.

The Self-Reliant Groups allow people to use the resources they have, rather than waiting for resources to be handed to them. They are not issue-based (e.g. focused on mental health problems or domestic abuse) but they can address specific issues, because they are used by people for whatever they think is best.  SRGs across the country also share their experiences and learn from each other.

Learning from this experience, Noel recommends a focus on context, ceding power, and getting out of the way. We must recognise that people can often solve their own problems, without formal agencies doing it for them. 

3.     DISCUSSION

Participants broke into smaller groups to consider what the state and civil society can do to build stronger relationships. Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

3.1 WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD RELATIONSHIPS AND TRUST

• Good relationships, it was suggested, emerge from:

  • Parity of relationship, with an equal footing between the state and community - traditional ways of working imply control by the state.

  • Permission, to challenge, to do things differently, with authority and accountability.

  • Partnership, based on equal trusting relationships.

• Good relationships are more likely to be produced when people come to the table willing to listen to others rather than determining beforehand what they want. And also when there is respect for those working on the ground.

• Strong relationships are those which emerge from tension, not those which avoid tension.  Keeping conflict buried is foolish and never works.

3.2 Learning from existing examples

• Experience from India and elsewhere suggest that the model of self–reliance can become widespread and highly influential on public services, and financial institutions, for example. For this to happen in the UK we will need to keep things simple, easy to establish, informal, and civil society organisations will need to co-ordinate their efforts better, rather than fight for themselves.

• Organisations like Groundswell are demonstrating that it is possible to create the conditions for people in difficult circumstances (in this case long term experience of homelessness) to become effective in supporting other people with similar difficulties in their lives.

• In Leeds there are 37 bottom-up neighbourhood networks, often led by older people.  There is a lot to be learned from models such as these, about fostering connections and improving lives.  

3.3 What makes things difficult

• The centre needs to get out of the way so that those on the ground can get on with things and even break the rules.  This requires a leap of faith and is not an easy step to take. For those in the statutory sector formality of structures can make this difficult, and for those in the voluntary sector, the funding regimes can be a problem. 

• Getting out of the way does not mean being absent.  There will often be a need for professionals in some shape or form to support peers to work well with each other, and to help manage stress associated with the work, and even to provide oversight and supervision.

• State-based community development tends to be short term and often fails to leave a legacy, especially where things are done to a community, not with them, or where professionals do not recognise the ability of people who are not professionals. 

3.4 Re-thinking the role of local government and civil society

• We need to lift our sights high, and consider how to ‘refound‘  local government, moving away from a ‘gatekeeping’ to an ‘enabling’, not ‘extracting’ role  – and identify the principles at its heart that we want to revive and sustain.  

• It was felt that in re-imagining local authorities we need to reduce the distinction and distance between those working in local government and those in community roles.  Local government could be redefined as part of a common local effort, working with and alongside other local agencies. Perhaps there ought to be ‘A Chief Relationships Officer’ to help facilitate this.  There needed to be a permission to challenge.

• Indeed, the problems of centralising command and control practices, and delivery of atomised services, are not confined to the public sector. They are also to be found in the charity sector.  Those who want to shift towards more distributed models of self-reliant social support and community building, working with the whole person, will do well to make common cause, whatever sector they are from.

• What if the community had a Power of Competence? The onus would be on the local authority to provide that a self-reliant group could not make use of a community centre, not on the group to prove that it could.

• What if there was a statutory requirement for local authorities to create an Easement function? In other words, if a community group could explain that a rule really doesn’t work for them, and the local authority would be required to consider easing the rule.

• There is often a deeply engrained but narrow sense of what the job is. We need to identify new and better public sector and civil society job roles, specifying the types of proactive enabling functions which can help to foster and support community self-help.

4.     TOPICS FOR FURTHER MEETINGS OF THE GROUP

The following topics were suggested:

• What are the proactive enabling roles which we would like to see public sector and voluntary sector agencies adopt, which can enhance the ‘What If’ types of relationship building and community self-help we have described above? 

• And what are the Why Nots? – in other words what are the obstacles which will get in the way?

We agreed that in the meantime blogs and video interviews would be helpful for the work of the group, and to help share our thinking more widely. All members of the group are encouraged to contribute in this way.  NB See this subsequent blog by Caroline Barnard.

5.     NEXT MEETING

Thursday 17th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm.

Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 2

Summary of Key Points

Leadership is important but great leadership is about enabling others. 

• When individuals change, collaboration is likely to continue where a clear, shared purpose has been created across organisations and has become part of the culture and where good relationships at all levels have already been forged. Language should be simple and shared, so that everyone understands the vision.

• Relationship-building and the connector role need to be recognised and funded.

• People must stop seeing themselves as organisational representatives and instead act as ‘systems leaders’ and ‘systems stewards’.  Lasting change only happens through distributive leadership.

• The focus must be on ensuring the system matches the needs of communities and individuals served, not organisations, and they need to be engaged and their voices  heard. 

• Governance can very important where formal partnerships are established, and succession planning is too often neglected.

Next time, we’ll be looking at what good collaboration, systems and distributive leadership looks like in practice.

In more detail

Steve Wyler introduced the meeting by summarising some of the key messages from the previous discussion:

• Relationship building is critical to good collaboration

• This relies on openness, trust and honesty

• Collaboration had been speeded up under Covid-19 and one of the reasons is that there is a clear common cause

• One question was how to build on this as circumstances changed

Steve explained that the focus of today’s discussion was what happens when key individuals move on?  He said that the thought leader for this cell, Cate Newnes-Smith, the CEO of Surrey Youth Focus, was now experiencing this challenge in the most tragic of circumstances.  The Director of Children’s Services in Surrey, with whom she and others had been working across sectors to transform opportunities and services for children and young people (known as Time for Kids), had suddenly died.  He invited her to speak about Dave Hill, the lessons she had learnt from him and about the future.  A blog she has written in tribute to Dave Hill and his work can be read here.

Cate said that great leaders are about enabling others: Dave had created space in the system for others to do things.  He had also brought in a really good team of people and had established a network of relationships between people in Surrey which meant that hopefully the reforms he had initiated would continue after his death.  Since Dave’s death, for example, she had recently presented about Time for Kids to the SEND partnership board and pledges had since flooded in to take it forward. 

Nonetheless his successor would be important, and Cate is hopeful that a successor to Dave will be chosen who wants to carry on taking the work in the same direction. Another plus factor is that as the political control of the council in Surrey tends to remain stable, the councillors and other senior leaders are unlikely to change in the next few years.

In conclusion, Dave had been a driving force, but she also thought that Dave had created such impressive momentum in the system and had put the right people in place to make it happen without him.

Points made in the subsequent discussion included:

• Relationship-building is essential and takes a long time and we need to find ways of getting this funded as part of the business model.  Individuals at all levels in the collaborating organisations need to see relationship-building as part of their job. Voluntary organisations were sometimes performing what a Better Way is now calling the ‘connector role’ but this is often not recognised or rewarded.  Indeed, contracts or grants tend to be awarded for specific purposes which do not include relationship-building.  Surrey Youth Focus was fortunate in that it was now being funded to do that connecting role by the council; and the Community Foundation for Surrey was increasingly seeing part of its role as convening.   A national example of government funding organisations to work together was DCMS’ place-based giving initiative which had given core funding to finance posts to facilitate collaboration for local-funding-raising. 

• The role of systems leadership must also be promoted but funding mechanisms can get in the way, encouraging competitive behaviours.  Surrey Youth Focus see ‘systems stewardship’ as part of their role, and what that meant for them was to ensure that ‘voice of the child is in the room when they are there’.  This needs to be built into commissioning and procurement, as was being done in Surrey in a co-operative bid for CAMS work.  With systems leadership also comes distributive leadership at all levels, which also helps to embed change and ensure it does not rely on any one individual.

• A shared purpose inside and across organisations which helps people to focus beyond their organisational agendas is crucial to good collaboration and it also helps to sustain collaboration when individuals move on.  Changeover of staff in local authorities could be a serious problem.  One person had worked with a council where three different CEOs were put in place over 5 years, with restructurings as well.  A lesson based on experience from the Wigan Deal is that two things are crucial  a) a culture linked to a clear bigger purpose and b) ownership of the agenda outside of the council of that purpose, as well as within.  If a bigger purpose is ingrained in the culture of the organisation, it naturally encourages people to work in a different way, including new people coming into the organisation.  A clear culture based on purpose ensures recruitment of new staff will result in a continuity of vision. Different parts of the local authority also work more seamlessly together where this is the case because staff share that bigger picture.  Language matters and needs to be clear, simple and shared across organisations.

• This purpose must be based on the needs of those served and it is important that their voices are built in through participative processes and through organisations who see it as part of their purpose to facilitate and represent those voices.

• Succession planning could also help ensure continuity but was neglected, and it was important to get governance and systems right, for example through co-chairing where there were formal partnerships, for example, where funds were jointly managed. That said, some collaboration could be driven by less formal mechanisms.  Time for Kids had no structure or governance and would only be effective if it influenced the agenda of existing bodies and partnerships such as Health and Well-Being Boards.  In that case, clear principles and vision were important.

The group finished by identifying this issue for discussion at its next meeting on 9th September at 3.00-4.30pm:

1. What does collaboration look like? How does it differ from other similar practices such as partnership or consultation?

2. What does systems leadership look like? How do we know it when we see it, how do we know when we don’t?

3. What does distributive leadership look like? What does it require in the way of leadership and followership?

Note from an online roundtable: Coronavirus - building community and connection 4

4th Meeting to inform Danny Kruger’s proposals for the Prime Minister

Held on Thursday 9th July 3.00-4.30pm.

Founding Better Way member Danny Kruger MP was invited by the Prime Minister to ‘develop proposals to maximise the role of volunteers, community groups, faith groups, charities and social enterprises, and contribute actively to the government’s levelling up agenda.’ 

Building on recent network discussions we produced a draft paper which we shared with Danny as work in progress. This meeting, attended by 74 Better Way members, was an opportunity to further inform Danny’s proposals, and also to help the Better Way feed in thinking to other politicians in this space.

As a result of the meeting, which Danny joined at the end, we produced this 2-page paper which is a summary of our thinking on what government can do to support connection and community.

Note from Changing Organisations Cell 1

First meeting of the Better Way ‘Changing Organisations’ cell, 8 July 2020

1.      SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

• Some organisations are practicing ‘radical listening’ – creating informal spaces for the people they work with to talk about their own experiences and ideas, and be heard, and develop an agenda for action accordingly.

• This can result in better services, capable of responding to people on their own terms, building their agency, and bringing humanity to the organisation’s work.

• This is very different from the widespread practice where organisations have their own agenda and seek to engage service users in it, effectively treating them as ‘other’.

• In order to practice radical listening well, organisations need to break down the boundaries between themselves and their ‘service users’.  This includes employing more people from the communities they serve.

• Radical listening can happen on-line, as recent experience has proved.

• Some funders are enabling organisations they fund to work in this way. Statutory agencies can too, although they often find it hard to do so.

2.      IN MORE DETAIL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of a Better Way, explained that the group had been set up to explore further the Better Way Call to Action theme of ‘changing organisations to focus on communities and solutions’, and in particular looking outwards, putting those we serve first, listening to and reflecting them in everything we do. 

COVID-19 has been an opportunity to do more of this, and to think how organisations can operate differently beyond the crisis.  We hope this cell will not only enable participants to share insights with each other but will also provide material that we can share with the wider network. 

Caroline introduced Karin Woodley from Cambridge House, who has agreed to act as a ‘thought leader’ for the group. Her presentation included these points:

• In recent years organisations have had to navigate hostile economic, regulatory and policy environments and many have responded by implementing strategies driven by a financial bottom line.  They have become distanced from service users, and handed over the definition of impact and values to funders and commissioners.

• COVID-19 has the potential to make this situation even worse, with organisations protecting themselves rather than service users. But, said Karin, this could also be a moment to work with communities to shape a new era.

• Karin explained that radical listening is a process to put those we serve first and to create connections, disrupting stereotypes, and empowering and transferring agency to those most affected by social injustice and poverty.

• It is an opportunity to challenge paternalistic cultures, gain control of our destinies, working hand in hand with service users, rather than delivering a plan to a passive group of the under-privileged.

• Our hearing has been contaminated, said Karin, and we have failed to listen to the lives and experiences of our service users. We have said too much ourselves, and not listened properly.  Instead we have filtered what we hear with our preconceived notions.

• We need to become the vehicles through which the communities in which we are based speak, and not act as their translators and gatekeepers.

• But who is doing the listening?  Often our staffing structures are White, middle class, well-meaning and liberal.  This too needs to change.

• Radical listening means you don’t reflect back, you don’t summarise, you don’t reshape sentences. Instead it means allowing people to get to the end of their sentences, to talk about their whole life experiences, to tell their whole stories. 

• Karin shared two examples where radical listening has led to change:

  • Cambridge House provides a statutory mental health advocacy service under a government contract. Karin baked a cake and held a discussion with a group of older Black women, to create a space for them to talk to each other and reflect on their experiences at the Maudsley Hospital.  As a result it became clear that the advocacy service needed to change to address matters such as food and diet, which had previously been neglected. 

  • The law centre at Cambridge House was providing generalist advice on housing employment and benefits. But after holding a discussion with service users it turned out that generalist advice was not what people really wanted. They wanted court action. So Cambridge House has moved away from generalist advice and became a specialist in taking legal action, eventually winning a landmark case against the local authority in the Supreme Court, changing the definition of statutory housing rights for those who are homeless, disabled or with a mental health condition.

• During COVID-19 the initial response from staff at Cambridge House was that services could not be delivered without face-to-face contact. But virtually all service users had phones, even those who are poor, or in care homes, or homeless, and so the organisation moved to digital services.  There was urgent need – in some care homes people were dying, criminal landlords were increasing their activities, families were losing tenancy rights as a result of a COIVID death, and there was a rise in COVID-related suicides.  There was high demand for support from Cambridge House. Because staff didn’t have the expertise, service users played a big role in designing on-line services, establishing multiple ways of communicating with Cambridge House. There is now more service user engagement and feedback, not less. 

• Looking forward, Cambridge House is considering how it can ensure that service users will be able to speak to the organisation on their own terms, using their preferred methods of communication, combining wider on-line reach with building-based delivery, and at the same time refocusing services to protect human rights, and provide more opportunities for people to speak out themselves and take action to bring about change.

In the following discussion participants made the following points:

ORGANISATIONS CAN BECOME MORE WELCOMING AND MORE RESPONSIVE

Some organisations claim to put people at the heart of everything they do, and wish to give the appearance of this, but don’t actually practise the type of radical listening that Karin has described, and carry on doing what they want to do, according to their own agenda.  Many organisations operate from buildings and pride themselves on offering welcoming spaces, but actually they are only really welcoming for those who come to do the things which the charity has arranged at particular times. But in the recent crisis many organisations have discovered that they can be adaptive and flexible and have been learning to listen better, and when they do so, they become more welcoming and add more value for their community. 

ORGANISATIONS FACE CHOICES IN HOW THEY TRANSLATE RADICAL LISTENING INTO ACTION

It is not enough to be listened to – the ability to make things happen and bring about change is what matters most. In recent Better Way discussions we have talked about solidarity.  Many charities operate vertically, people in positions of privilege doing things for the poor.  The alternative, it has been suggested, is solidarity, people combining with others to do things for themselves. This is essentially a community development approach. But some felt that this, by itself, is not sufficient. When, for example, someone comes home to find their landlord has put all their belongings out on the street, they just want someone to provide a roof over their head. And where there is a pattern of injustice, organisations can work with service users to take targeted action to bring about a wider change.

EMPOWERING FRONT-LINE STAFF IS PART OF RADICAL LISTENING

It is easier for organisations to listen if their front-line is empowered and are therefore more able to develop relationships and to respond flexibly.  Equally it can be a big challenge for larger organisations to listen – and learn – from their front-line staff.  You have to invert the normal order.

ORGANISATIONS CAN REDUCE ‘US AND THEM’ BARRIERS

Organisations can do more to break down the perception that their staff and their services users are different in kind.  We need organisations that are open and inclusive, capable of behaving as if staff and service users are all part on one family.  Lived experience inside organisations is important.

We will need to appreciate that experiences of lockdown have been very different. For some it is been a relatively pleasant few months, for others a troubling and confusing time, and for some the worst experience of their lives. We will need to find ways to allow people to listen to and appreciate these different experiences.

FUNDERS CAN CREATE FAVOURABLE CONDITIONS FOR RADICAL LISTENING

In the COVID crisis some independent funders have been changing the nature of the conversation with those they fund, listening to charities more, allowing them to work responsively, and not holding them to plans set three years ag

STATUTORY ORGANISATIONS CAN ADOPT RADICAL LISTENING, BUT FACE PARTICULAR CHALLENGES

One of our participants shared an example from South Korea, a country which has had an authoritarian history, and where citizens have not been used to public participation. Nine years ago Seoul City declared itself to be a ‘listening city’. A symbolic ‘Big Ear’ was placed outside the city hall, where citizens could make complaints or share ideas. The Mayor of Seoul set up a mobile office, meeting local residents in different neighbourhoods, and even spent some weeks living in poor housing in deprived neighbourhoods. But after four years, it became clear there were limitations to this listening exercise. It was also necessary to shift the internal system of how City government works, for example establishing participatory budgeting, and building relationships between City officials and citizens and local community groups. This remains work in progress.

In this country statutory organisations find radical listening very difficult, in part because they have formally prescribed agendas. They can sometimes provide licence to others to operate without formal plans, and to act in response to what they hear from the people they work with. But such experiments are nearly always of short duration, and rarely translate into mainstream practice.

It was suggested that radical listening can flourish best in the spaces between formal institutions.

ORGANISATIONS ADAPTED DURING COVID-19, ALTHOUGH THERE WERE DIFFERENT DRIVERS FOR THIS

During the COVID-19 there has been a notable difference between organisations which have adapted by listening to and learning from their ‘front lines’, and those that haven’t. The government response to the spread of the epidemic in care homes was a tragic example of the latter, when they failed to listen to front line voices, until people were dying in large numbers. If ever there was a time when ‘the last should be first and the first should be last’ this was it, it was argued.

At the same time, COVID-19 has also shown that financial drivers can produce positive change. Some parts of the private sector, for example supermarkets and private schools, have been able to re-engineer their business models with great success, at scale and at speed, listening to and responding to customer demand in ways that arguably would not have happened in the public and voluntary sectors. However, it was also pointed out that people working in many charities have also shown themselves to be nimble in COVID-19, willing to be pushed and be challenged. 

ORGANISATIONS MUST NOT REVERT TO THE PRE-COVID MODELS

Over many years we underachieved in terms of social equity. If we had been more successful we wouldn’t have seen the obscene level of inequity we have seen in COVID-19. Organisations, it was felt, must ‘steal the moment’ to do better, not revert to how things were done before.

Suggestions for topics for further meetings:

• Can we distil the essence of radical listening, learning from different examples? 

• What is needed to change the composition and roles of staff and boards in organisations to support radical listening?

• How can statutory sector organisations create more space for radical listening.

We will invite others from our network to join the group.

NEXT MEETINGS

The next meeting will be on 8th September at 3.00-4.30pm.

We also agreed to arrange a third meeting in November (date to be set).

FURTHER READING

Here is a blog by Karin Woodley about Radical Listening.

Note from Changing the Narrative Cell 1

First meeting of the Better Way ‘Changing the Narrative’ cell, 25 June 2020

1. Summary of key points

• We want the national conversation to shift from 'them and us' to caring for each other, in which everyone contributes and also has responsibilities.

• We need to create platforms for people to tell stories where they are the heroes, not our services.

• We need to use new language, for example ‘valuable’ not ‘vulnerable’.

• At future meetings we are going to focus on the barriers to this kind of narrative and what we can do about them.

2. In more detail

Steve Wyler, co-convenor of a Better Way, explained that we hope the new cell will not only enable participants to share insights with each other but will also provide material that we can share with the wider network.  The group had been set up to explore further the Better Way Call to Action bullet point - ‘to see the potential in everyone and stop services becoming a ‘problem industry’ – also reflected in the Better Way principle ‘building on strengths is better than focusing on weaknesses’. 

There were three levels to the change a Better Way would like to see, he explained:

• Individual practitioners to change their relationship with those they serve;

• Providers of services in the voluntary and public sector to stop using narratives which present people as problems or ‘vulnerable’;

• Government and opinion formers to stop using a national narrative which too often portrays recipients of welfare and people experiencing poverty or issues in their lives negatively.

The group would be focusing primarily on the last two – how to change the overall narrative.

He introduced Neil Crowther from Social Care Future, who had agreed to act as what we are calling a ‘thought leader’ for the group.  His presentation included these points:

• The language we use, the ‘framing’ is incredibly influential, reinforcing familiar stories and emotions which influence how we see things e.g. talking of  crime as a ‘virus’ points to social solutions, as opposed to presenting it as a ‘beast’, which points to police intervention.

• Hopeful narratives are empowering, and ways to foster hope include focusing on solutions, opportunities and what we stand for as well as emphasising the role of everyday heroes.

• Social Care Future is seeking to shift the narrative which currently presents social care as being in crisis, broken and about to collapse and which puts the sector centre stage, not the people served, presenting it as a Cinderella service.  We talk of caring for the ‘vulnerable’, which creates a them and us.

• Talk of the ‘vulnerable’ has peaked in the Covid-19 crisis but another story has also emerged, of mutual aid and caring about each other, not just caring for.

• The latter provides a different basis for how we think about people in the adult social care system, and indeed elsewhere – as caring for each other, reciprocity, ‘valuable rather than vulnerable’.  Reciprocity is key, where instead of offering someone help, you ask them for a favour.

• We need to look at who are the heroes of our stories, and who is telling it?  Is it the professional, or the agency, or the people whom they serve?  It should be the latter.

• Looking at the wider national conversation, and the stories service providers tell about those they work with, he hoped we could move to a hopeful narrative of solidarity, in which we care for each other, and in which we foster a sense of agency, rather than painting people as problems.

• As an example, he showed an advert made by NSPCC which portrayed a boy supported by the charity as achieving his dream of becoming an astronaut.

We then broke into three breakout groups to consider ‘What is the story we want to tell?’ These were some of the points made in the following discussion, facilitated by Caroline Slocock, Better Way co-convenor:

• There was broad agreement about the need for a new narrative around mutual support, breaking down the ‘them and us’ and telling a story of ‘all of us’ which can help to build agency.

• We have seen how digital tools can democratise storytelling, especially among young people. 

• We should avoid presenting people as ‘case studies’ and stereotyping them. It is important to give power to people to tell their own stories in their own language, whilst also managing risks and practising safeguarding. 

• That often involves giving up power and instead creating platforms for others.  Too often, organisations working with people feel that ‘they know best’ and this is a holding on to power.  They are attracted to ‘rescuer narratives’ which cast the organisation as the hero in the story.  They encourage people they work with to tell a negative story about themselves, e.g. the homeless young person retelling their sad story, and this reinforces rather than helps to overcome problems.

• Changing the narrative also requires a culture and systems change and this cannot be done by one organisation in isolation.  We need to work together on this.

• The people who have experienced difficulties in their lives are often incredibly resilient and strong, but we insist on presenting them as vulnerable.

• Stories have heroes as well as villains.  The system should be the villain, not the individual, but too often we blame them.

• Language was important and often got in the way.  It is hard to change our own internal narratives.

• We should look at the bigger picture of a culture of individualism over the last 40 years which is all pervasive and which underplays the importance of relationships and how people find fulfilment through them.  We need to emphasise the responsibility we have toward each other and also help people find their sense of purpose.

Next time the group wanted to look at the barriers to the hopeful narrative of mutual help – what stands in the way of making it happen, and what can we do about it.

3. Dates of next meetings:

• Tuesday 21 July, 3.00-4.30pm

• Monday 7 September, 3.00-4.30pm

4. Further reading/viewing

Neil Crowther shared some links after the meeting:

• A guide to hope-based communications

• The Vulnerables – an article by disability rights campaigner Baroness Jane Campbell.

• A selection of various podcasts and blogposts at #socialcarefuture

• An example of someone who uses services being heard: Anna Severwight reframing the discussion on funding at the Commons Health and Social Care Committee

Margo Horsley shared some links which describe the work of Fixers, an initiative (no longer running) which enabled young people to tell their stories, and to be heard, understood and respected by others.

• What is Fixers: https://youtu.be/39sYPhAg-Sw.

• Some fixers reflecting: http://www.fixers.org.uk/index.php?page_id=3244.

• National platforms: http://www.fixers.org.uk/feel-happy-fix/fixing-child-sexual-exploitation/home.php .

• A campaign on sex education in schools (the Government Minister at the time, Maria Miller, believed that it was individual voices that had made change happen despite all the work put in by other institutions over the years): http://www.fixers.org.uk/index.php?module_instance_id=11208&core_alternate_io_handler=view_news&data_ref_id=16291

Note from an online roundtable: Coronavirus - building community and connection 3

Note of a third online roundtable on the coronavirus crisis and the power of connection and community, 18 June 2020

1. Summary

We started with speakers who set the scene, then went into four breakout groups, and came back into a plenary discussion in which the groups reported back. The key messages were:

• A common purpose in the Covid-19 crisis is driving collaboration.  Can we create a future common purpose as we emerge from the crisis?

• The surge in mutual aid, and the Black Lives Matter protests, have raised fundamental questions about the role of many institutions. A shift in power, and a letting go, is clearkly required. But there will be resistance. 

• The state and charities have a tendency to ‘colonise’ human connections to validate their own work.  But we know from excellent examples it need not be like this.

• The recent procurement guidelines have encouraged collaboration rather than competition, and these need to be maintained.

• The role of local community anchors as ‘cogs of connection’ has been undervalued.  And we need to better appreciate the different roles that individuals, community groups, established voluntary agencies, businesses, as well as local and national government can best play.

2. In more detail

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the discussion. She explained that this was a third meeting on Covid19 and the power of connection and community. Our Call to Action for a Better Way called for a radical shift to liberate the power of connection and community and in recent weeks across the country we have seen inspiring examples of this, despite physical distancing.

The discussions have highlighted both opportunity and danger. Many of the things we have set out in our Call to Action (collaborative leadership, sharing power, changing organisations and shifting practices in favour of human relationships) are happening, sometimes faster and better than we could have imagined. There has been more solidarity and sense of purpose, flexibility, creativity, a speed of response, new connections and collaborations, as well as more humanity and kindness. But the future is more likely to be a negative one, with more inequality, more command and control, and more suffering.  So what can we do collectively and individually to turn this into a moment where things go better in the future, not worse? And in particular this meeting will consider how we can we build on the collaborative leadership that is already happening, to change for good.

Nick Plumb, Locality

Nick highlighted findings from the new Locality report ‘We were built for this’. Local collaborative relationships are being built in many places, driven in part by shared purpose across sectors and across public agencies. Collaboration has especially flourished where there were pre-existing relationships with community organisations. Community organisations were often able to take the lead and move quickly, not waiting to ask permission. National procurement guidance issued at beginning of the crisis allowed greater flexibility and this also helped to create favourable conditions for partnership.

The report contains recommendations on community powered economic recovery, on ways of turning community spirit into community power, and on collaborative public services. These include a shift from the competitive mind-set which has underpinned public services for many years to a new collaborative mind-set.  In the wake of a decade of cuts in public spending the report calls for a review of local government finance including new fiscal powers to reverse cuts to preventative services, and tackle inequality. The recent very welcome cabinet office guidance on procurement should be further embedded, rather than a return to normal. Government should also promote models of service transformation partnerships between councils, community organisations, and health agencies and peer learning programmes such as the Locality-hosted The Keep it Local Network should be expanded.  There are several opportunities to influence government investment and policy to support a shift in favour of local collaboration, including the long-promised UK Shared Prosperity Fund, the forthcoming Community Ownership fund, and the forthcoming Devolution White Paper.

The report also explains that community-led anchor organisations can play a critical role in establishing ‘cogs of connection’ in a locality, but as Nick pointed out this not always recognised and rarely funded through public sector contracts, and that needs to change

Becca Dove, Camden Council

Becca is head of family support and complex families. She described a recent Zoom call led by the manager of Kentish Town Community Centre, with local residents, a council colleague who runs food hubs, a local GP delivering social prescribing by bringing people together in a garden, and partners from University College London. In the meeting there was no distinction between the council staff, residents, community workers, and academics.  ‘Lanyards were left on the floor’, said Becca, and people made on the spot offers to help each other: ‘I can do that for you.’  There was a strong sense of the commons, of everyone seeing themselves as stewards, wanting to leave Kentish Town in a better place, and seeing connection and relationships as the way to do that. Becca wrote an article in April, recognising that the state doesn’t always have the answer, and that during the emergency the community have given the solutions to a problem in countless ways. The job of the council is to lend hand and hearts to the constant collective effort, making a contribution, respecting what residents need and want, and recognising the widespread goodness in the community. New public management forced everyone down the wrong road, but there are a lot of public servants who think and feel as Becca does, she feels.

3. Achieving more collaborative leadership

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the question, ‘What can be done nationally and locally to achieve more collaborative leadership in the coming months?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion, included the following points:

Common purpose

• There is an underlying power imbalance, and while people have generally put aside competitive behaviours and organisational roles in the crisis, we can’t assume that will continue in future.

• A sense of shared endeavour in the face of a common enemy has been critical to encourage collaboration. We will need to establish a new common cause in the months ahead, one capable of determining how we behave towards each other and which will maintain the shift from ‘I AM’ to ‘WE ARE’. 

• We will need to describe and name the future we want to see as clearly as possible.

Letting go

• In times of crisis institutions have discovered they do not have the flexibility to respond to community action, and when they do respond, they often do so in ways which seek to validate themselves.  They need to learn to let go and trust.  Where that has happened it leaves a positive legacy and the foundations for a different kind of relationship.

• The conventional charity model may not be the way forward.  It has been challenged by the wave of mutual aid, and by the recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some organisations are thinking deeply out their purpose and role and how they work. But there are many in institutions of all sectors who are not ready or willing to let go, and will want to hold on to their power. 

Understanding different roles

• There are different and distinctive roles that can be played by community self-help, established community organisations, and the public authorities. 

• There is an unresolved debate about role of the state. Is the role for local government, for example, to protect citizens, by taking action directly, or should it adopt a more hands-off role which allow people to take action on their own terms?

• It was suggested that charities achieve most when they see their role as meeting the purpose of individuals. 

• Businesses have been compelled to rethink their purpose, and a new alignment between communities and businesses might be possible.  

Commissioning and procurement

• The prevailing commissioning system is hard-wired to drive competition between groups,  and that produces weak and transactional relationships.  But good commissioning can encourage collaboration. Human Learning Systems, developed by Better Way member Toby Lowe, with Collaborate, presents an alternative to new public management methods, and sets out a better path for commissioning and procurement.

The Moral Economy

• It’s not always about money, but it is always about connection, it was felt.  The term ‘moral economy’ describes economic activity that can take place without money changing hands. This can happen on a very big scale (for example in the Arba’een pilgrimage in Iraq which can include 20 million people and where people are fed without money for days on end). 

• Civic immune systems – the precious nature of relationships between human peoples, can be infected and damaged by funding, interventions of voluntary agencies, or the state. Individualism on the political left and right has led to outsourcing many things that we used to do as families and communities.  We should not seek to go backwards, but human life is enriched when we do things together.  The distinctions between labour, work, and action made by Hannah Arendt may be helpful in our thinking on this.

Creating conditions for collaboration to flourish

• Community spaces and other forms of local infrastructure can encourage connectivity and help to build a more equal and mutually supportive society, as Eric Klinenberg’s book Palaces for the People explains (and see an interview with him here). 

• We need to understand what it takes for people to relate to each other well. The language we use can help, or can get in the way. Many terms in widespread use (like complex families, vulnerable people) reinforce them-and-us divisions, and we need to frame our story in different ways. 

• A strong signal from central government in favour of collaborative practice, in service of local communities, and to create the conditions for people to do things on their own terms, would be helpful, and would confer permission for those in the public sector and beyond to do things differently.  But it is best not to depend on that, it is always better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.

• Some things, mutual aid groups for example. are best left alone, and certainly not regulated. 

4. Next meeting

 We agreed we should organise a further meeting, in a few weeks’ time. Suggested topics for discussion:

• The unifying shared purpose beyond the COVID-19 crisis. 

• The changing and distinctive roles of individuals, community organisations, charities, and the state, and the contribution each can make to the social architecture we want to see in the future. 

Better Way members are invited to contribute blogs and video clips on these or related topics. 

Note from Changing Practices Cell 1

Note of a first Better Way cell on ‘Changing practices through relationship-centred practices and policies,’ held online on 10th June 2020

SUMMARY

Covid-19 has strengthened relationships, including local partnerships, given more agency to employees and led to professionals working in new ways that are giving the people they work with more agency.  Online relationships have worked well for some people but not all, and we’ll need blended services in future.  There is a short window in which to embed these changes as we come out of the pandemic and, amongst other things, we need to tell the story so that we inspire others to do more.  Building stronger relationships involves a different power relationship between the individual, civil society and the state which is one of the issues we will be exploring next time.

1.     AIMS OF THE CELL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. We hope to build on an earlier Better Way roundtable about relationship-centred public policy in the coronavirus emergency and beyond. Before Covid-19 Caroline wrote a report on deep value relationships bringing together the insights from many sources, including David Robinson’s Relationships Project, and one of the conclusions was that we have a moment where potentially we could redesign existing services around relationships, and that we can build on existing practice, but need to do more together to build the case to make this widespread. Our Call to Action for a Better Way includes ideas around changing practices, putting humanity and kindness into services and building connection and community through relationships, not just passive services. 

This cell is a working group which will meet several times, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.

2.     OPENING PRESENTATIONS

We started the meeting with two presentations:

DAVID ROBINSON

David introduced the Relationships Project. This is exploring a big question: how do we build a better society by building better relationships?  In specific terms this might include, for example, a better neighbourhood, a better community group, a better health service, a better school. Those involved in the Relationships Project are asking themselves how their own place (their neighbourhood, their team, their classroom) would change, if relationships were the central operating principle.

The Relationships Project has set up an Observatory to publish ‘sightings’ and take stock of what of what is being learned. Within much current activity around Covid-19, not least the thousands of Whats App groups, several undercurrents in attitudes and behaviours are emerging:

• From doubting to trusting (neighbours are shopping for people they hardly know, front-line staff have budgets and responsibilities they didn’t have before);

• From controlling to enabling (this includes more equal partnerships between independent organisations and the state, more sharing of leadership and power, more enabling styles of support);

• From competing to co-operating (this is driven by an awareness that no single organisation or department or individual can fix the problems);

• From standardised methods to personalised methods (this is found in many disparate practices, not least teaching, shopping, worship, and domiciliary care, and is engaging people who have been overlooked for a long time);

• From me to we (a tide of good will has been generated by the crisis and by permission to behave differently).

David noted that there has been inconsistency from place to place, and a shift backwards in recent weeks: bonding capital (between ‘people like us’) is still strong but bridging capital (between ‘people less like us’) is becoming weaker.  But nevertheless there has been an emergence of behaviours which are principle-led, more can-do, kinder, more emotionally responsive, personal and human. 

A key question is how to ‘bank’ these gains in ways which also preserve that which was good before?  Developments in technology have worked for many people but do not replace the preceding models of face-to-face contact.  So how do we integrate and combine the best of the old and the best of the new into our work? David believes there may be a window of six months to do that well, before the pendulum swings back. 

Ten million people have been involved in caring for others (for more than three hours a week) and 78% say they intend to continue. So, how do we enable and support that to happen without killing what makes it special and beautiful?  The answer, said David, is not for the state to establish a volunteer army, nor to simply stand by and say let’s see what happens. We will need to design a light touch framework that doesn’t rely on chance but fills in the gaps and consciously seeks to embed the change in the years ahead.

PAUL FARMER

Paul is CEO of national charity MIND, and he shared several reflections.

Because the lockdown rules set at a national level were clear this has allowed permission and flexibility at a local level, street by street. The regulatory structure largely disappeared, with little backlash.  While there will always be some abuses, the prevailing story has not been one of safeguarding breaches, nor of high volumes of scamming. 

Paul pointed out that the voluntary sector has demonstrated that it is possible to reach a mature stage of relationships characterised by co-opetition (competing and co-operating at the same time).  Many organisations have recognised the benefits of working co-operatively for the greater good or common cause, while also competing in some instances.

He also noted that the voluntary sector as employers had developed a new relationship with their own staff, giving them permission to get on with the task as many worked at home during the lockdown, and relying on trust, rather than oversight.  This had worked well.

There appears to have been a shift from the selfish to the selfless.  We have taken more notice of the people who live next door, and have benefited from deeper human interaction. Relationships between the individual, community, state, and employers are all changing. Many people who are working at home have been given permission to get on with things, and there is no sign of a productivity problem as a result. Employers are discovering they can trust more.

We have seen coalitions emerge to promote connectivity, for example the Connection Coalition,  and the Together Coalition – perhaps these could themselves connect up with us? 

There are, Paul noted, many serious concerns about the mental health of people in the emergency, but building resilience during the much longer and messier period of emerging from the crisis may prove to be a still harder task. National initiatives to date, including the NHS Volunteering Scheme, have adopted a largely transactional model, but haven’t addressed the need for a deeper set of relationships. 

Some people are able to access digital services and really like them, and online therapy works for some, but many others don’t have that access or are uncomfortable with on-line methods.  The future, said Paul, will be a blend of on-line and offline services, but what that looks like is not yet clear.

Above all we must not lose sight of the fundamental need for human connection. We have been hyper-local for three months, and we have lost some of the connections between places, and across communities. The recent Black Lives Matter debate about race and identity has been challenging but also gives some grounds for hopefulness, if we can bring people together into a better connected space.

3.     DISCUSSION

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the questions, ‘What are you doing to create connection and community and what can be done to make this more widespread?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

• We need to understand the catalysts and preconditions for people to come together and build relationships, recognising for example the importance of social infrastructure and behind-the-scenes systems.

• Professionals have been working in new ways with their ‘clients’, and despite the distancing created by IT this has sometimes led to a subtle shift in power away from professionals to their clients and to better relationships.  There were lessons, but these need to be articulated clearly, so that the recent shift in behaviour can be maintained.

• We cannot underestimate the importance of telling the story, not least of how institutional and professional worlds have changed and can change.

• We always had it in us to do this together and we have proved that, but there were particular conditions, there was an emergency, we had more time, and we were at home. But we now need to prepare for the time when one or more of these conditions is no longer present.

•  New ways of working, founded on human relationships, can flourish where we recognise a shared purpose, for example when a group of agencies decide to work together to improve life chances for young people.  On the other hand, compartmentalised ways of working (with different agencies offering support on addiction, mental health, homelessness, for example) makes it harder to build relationships.

•  The state has conditioned people and communities to expect a certain type of relationship for decades. But this can change.  For example John Alexander has set out ideas for how local authorities can step into a ‘Citizen future’.

•  We will need to consider carefully how power operates in relationships, and the tensions inherent in that.  There is often an imbalance of power in relationships. That is not in itself bad, for example a doctor/patient relationship is never equal, but can nevertheless work well. But in some circumstances the imbalance can become poisonous. 

• People are stepping up in neighbourhoods, and discovering their power, but there is also a desire from centralised institutions to take back control, for example in managing volunteering.  

• The building of relationships can help to overcome deeply entrenched inequalities, but that needs to start with humility, a willingness to learn and to be exposed to vulnerability.

We also noted that within the Better Way network we have missed face-to-face contact but the experience of Zoom has helped us connect with each other in some ways better than before, removing geographic barriers, and allowing wider participation, in ways we had not anticipated.    

4.     TOPICS FOR FURTHER MEETINGS OF THE GROUP

The following were suggested as topics for the group to address in future meetings:

• What are the implications of digital platforms for relationship building?

• What relationships would we like to see between individuals, civil society and the state? 

• What is a good relationship when there is a power imbalance?

• How we can anticipate the impact of the impending recession on relationships?

• Having discovered each other in an emergency, how can we now discover capacity to do other things together?

It was felt that our future meetings should ground our discussions in practical examples, such as the work of Wevolution in establishing self-reliant groups, or the experience of relationship-building across sectors in Camden, for example. 

We agreed that in the meantime blogs and video interviews would be helpful for the work of the group, and to help share our thinking more widely. All members of the group are encouraged to contribute in this way.

5.     NEXT MEETINGS

• Thursday 16th July, 3.00pm-4.30pm

• Thursday 17th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm

Note from Collaborative Leadership in Place Cell 1

Summary

Collaborative leadership is fundamental to place-based working: ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.’

• At the heart of this is relationship building, for its own sake, in advance of a specific need.

• It helps to be enthusiastic, open and honest, to build trust with other people.

• It is possible to work as a systems leader or steward, and create spaces for people to come together, so that they learn to respect each other as valued contributors to a shared cause.

• Where beneficiaries, not organisations, are the primary focus, more will be achieved.

The Covid-19 crisis, while terrible in its impact, has nevertheless created favourable conditions for collaboration.  One challenge will be to sustain this as the crisis recedes, and another will be to find ways of establishing and embedding a collaborative system that can survive departure of key individuals.

1. Aims of the cell

Steve Wyler, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell. Our Call to Action for a Better Way explained that ‘Our systems and leadership styles often force organisations to compete against each other rather than collaborating to achieve the changes people need.’  This cell is for those who are working in places to put the Better Way principles into action and want to learn from each other about how best to abandon organisational silos and become systems leaders, and develop common causes and shared outcomes, within and across sectors.

The cell is a working group which will meet several times, to explore these questions in some depth, to help its members share their insights and experience, and develop strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond.

2. Opening Presentations

We started the meeting with two presentations:

Cate Newnes-Smith from Surrey Youth Focus described how she has built relationships over several years with people from the statutory sector, and as a consequence was asked to play a part in the appointment of the council Chief Executive Joanna Killian, who then brought in Dave Hill as Social Services Director, and this created an opportunity for a new way of doing things. Cate explained that she makes a point of building relationships before she needs them, inviting people for a coffee, asking them what they need, and listening.

Through the Better Way, Cate heard about Toby Lowe’s work on Human Learning Systems, and realised that she and others like her were carrying out the role of a ‘systems steward’.  Surrey Youth Focus now has one foot in the third sector camp, and one in the public sector camp, and know both well, and a lot of its work is bringing people together, getting people talking, making things happen – on many levels both strategic and tactical.  This has resulted, for example, in the Time for Kids initiative, which is being rolled out to all practitioners across Surrey, encouraging them to focus on positive relationships with children.  This initiative started with a small group convened by Cate, which began by building trust. 

Cate distinguished between strong and weak collaboration.  In a strong collaboration all the partners embark, as it were, on a boat with everyone agreeing the direction together, and they stand together at the helm making adjustments as needed.  This is very different from the much weaker (but very common) forms of collaboration, where the invitation is ‘come on to our boat, and we will steer it, and will allow you to express an opinion every now and again’.  Cate reminded us of the useful phrase: ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.’

Avril McIntyre, from Community Resources, in Barking and Dagenham explained that seven years ago there was a new Council Leader and a new Chief Executive, both with a vision to do something different.  Many in the voluntary sector had become used to campaigning against the statutory agencies, but Avril and some others realised there was an opportunity to work with the Council and help shape direction.  Last year the contract for voluntary sector infrastructure came up to for tender. Avril and eight other charity leaders took the opportunity to come together, with the ambition to act as door openers rather than gatekeepers, and to work together to share power and change the dynamic across the social sector.  They established the Barking and Dagenham Collective. 

This is not a traditional CVS, but rather aims to grow the social sector through partnerships and collaboration.  For example the council was developing an adult care strategy and wanted to consult with the voluntary sector. The Collective said no, let’s not do that, instead let’s all get in a room together and re-imagine what adult social care could look like locally.

When Covid-19 hit it was horrific, but it also accelerated collaboration, connection and relationship. Because trust had already been established, the Council was more easily able to accept that often the voluntary sector was better placed to take action in the emergency, and a connected borough-wide response quickly took shape.  Where things didn’t go well, it was always possible to pick up the phone and get it sorted.  This felt to Avril like a very different way of operating, compared to the past. Avril shared some examples:

• The foodbanks hadn’t talked to each other for twenty years but now a WhatsApp group was formed, with 17 foodbanks working together.  The Council quadrupled referrals to foodbanks, but rather than simply offloading a problem, is now working with the foodbanks to develop a food strategy for the borough.

• Children’s social care wanted to produce a directory of voluntary services, and asked for voluntary sector representation on a Council panel.  The Collective said no, we won’t do that, but instead we will put you all together, in a room, with the voluntary agencies who are working with the children and young people who are being exploited.

The thing to do, explained Avril, is to create an environment where people are talking together, and building relationships, and are willing to hear one another – then something changes.

3. Discussion

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the questions, ‘What are we learning about working across sectors in a place?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Caroline Slocock, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

• Relationships are centrally important.  Where people had put in the time previously to build local relationships this has proved valuable in the crisis. Conversely, some large agencies, for example in the housing sector, struggled to respond where they didn’t have the local connections.

• It helps to be enthusiastic, open and honest, to build trust with other people.

• Collaboration can be highly dependent on a few individuals in leading roles. When they move on, the collaborative efforts are put at risk. So, what can be done to maintain a collaborative culture and practice – a system - which is less dependent on a few key individuals?

• Relationships with the private sector can be very valuable in a place but are often neglected.  A presumption of moral superiority in the charity sector (often unwarranted) is a big obstacle.

• There are often power imbalances.  Smaller local agencies, especially BAME and women’s organisations, are still having bad experiences at the hands of larger ones. With funding pressures post-Covid, many smaller organisations, closest to the ground and to the people they serve, will be especially at risk. We need to build partnerships where there is much more mutual recognition and respect for the value generated by small as well as large organisations.

• It is important that the voices of people are heard and acted upon.  Creating a good place is not just about a physical space but about our place in society, and collaborations need to ensure that those who are not currently heard can express their views of what the place and space means for them so that the place works for them.

• The common cause produced by crisis has enabled rapid change, sharing information for example, or new ways of working with people.  But there is now a risk that momentum in favour of collaboration will be lost as the crisis recedes.

• Good collaboration and strong partnerships require clear purpose, a shared vision, where beneficiaries are the focus, not organisations.

• However, this focus can be difficult to maintain.  When leaders become once-removed from beneficiaries, their attention and energy can too often switch to organisational management.  They are constantly tempted to act in ways designed to secure the future of their organisation, and for example bid for work that others could deliver better.  Organisational leaders need to be explicit that they will not compete with others ‘just because they can’.

4. Topics for further meetings of the group

The following were suggested (at the meeting and subsequently) as topics for the group to address in future meetings:

• How do we establish a system based on relationship and trust that will continue even when people move on?

• Public engagement in systems change (e.g. in citizens assemblies or in other ways).

Members of the group are invited to provide blogs, video clips, on building relationships and on building collaborative systems, and also to suggest others to join the group.

5.  Next meetings

• Thursday 15th July, 3.00pm-4.30pm

• Thursday 9th September, 3.00pm-4.30pm

Note from Sharing Power Cell 1

Note of a first Better Way cell on Sharing Power, held online 2nd June 2020

Aims of the Cell

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the cell.  The concept of power was at the heart of Our Call to Action for the Better  Way which was launched at the end of last year: firstly the power of connection and community which we are trying to unlock, and secondly the fact that people feel powerless and that power is in too few hands. 

We are at a crossroads moment, Caroline said. Things could go very badly and social inequality and divisions could deepen, or alternatively we can sense the possibility of opening up a new kind of society. This cell is a working group to share ideas and experiences, and develop new strategies which we can turn into a document to share across our network and beyond. Sue Tibballs has agreed to be a thought leader, and we will have a series of meetings over the coming months. 

Participants introduced ourselves. We come from many different parts of the country and our experience extends across many parts of the social sector, e.g:

Social housing, homelessness, community action, community development and planning, community organising, migrants and refugees, advocacy and participation, participatory budgeting and citizens panels, the NHS, customer collaboration, grant-making, women and domestic abuse, policy development, social enterprise, campaigning, local government, social work and family support, relational activism, child protection, research, public sector transformation, international development, theatre and story-telling.

Our particular interests in the sharing power theme include:

• Sharing power that is hoarded in too few hands.

• Igniting the power that people have and don’t use.

• Building power in places where people have not had the opportunity to do so.

• The relationship between elected representatives and community democracy.

• How power can be shared in the COVID recovery phase.

• How organisations which are haver to change in response to the current crisis can do so in ways which are more deliberative and participative and empowering.

• Race and power dynamics.

• Strengths-based approaches and tackling stigma.

• How theatre can tell untold stories ignite people’s own power and disrupt norms of how discussions take place.

• Developing a shared understand of the term power, with a focus on making people’s lives more empowered.

• Understanding better the barriers to sharing power.

The Power Sharing project

Sue Tibballs introduced the Sheila McKecknie Foundation (SMK) social change grid, noting that power is held in all four quadrants.

Agencies seeking social change have tended to focus their efforts on the bottom right quadrant (lobbying government or other formal institutions) but as Sue pointed out this quadrant has been the least interesting space for social change in recent years. Sue explained that social change can emerge from all four quadrants of this grid, and increasingly from the top half.

So in our discussions about sharing power we should not assume that the only task is to invite people who do not get heard to present themselves to politicians and business leaders. Change is complex and power is complex and we should keep that in our minds in the work of this cell.

Grace Wyld noted that the Power Sharing project hosted by SMK is working across civil society in London, with a community of practice of more than 200 people, and is considering the question, ‘What would it look like if civil society in London was better at sharing power in pursuit of social change, and how would we get there?’ Grace and Sue will be able to share learning from this project at future meetings.

Breakout sessions

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the questions ‘Whose voices are heard and whose aren’t?’ and ‘What does this tell us about power and how it works?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

Unheard voices

• There are many unheard and marginalised voices, not least disabled people, people with learning disabilities, families under child protection arrangements, homeless people, people with substance abuse, to give just a few examples.

• Many of these are people who are deemed to be un-deserving or at fault, or regarded as ‘not like us’. Stigma is driven by fear, and is made worse by the failure of communication. 

• We should not be thinking in paternalistic terms, e.g. ‘giving people a voice’. People already have a voice, but the problem is that often they have few opportunities to use it or when they do they are not listened to.  Moreover, what matters is not just whose voices are being heard, but also who controls and sets the agenda.

• As we have seen in the Covid-19 crisis there is a struggle between local and national power, and an ever-present tendency to centralise decision-making and resources.  This leaves many people at community level feeling powerless and ignored.

Spaces which allow voices to be heard

• So how do voices break through? It is possible to establish public or shared spaces which allow people to speak for themselves, on their own terms. One example is the family conversations model which Camden council has promoted.

• However, we noted that public discussion can be fraught with tension. In some cases participation is motivated by adversity and anger. Often discussion about change and what the future could look like is felt to be too ‘political’ and is discouraged.

How we and others can move forward

• We can challenge ourselves to think outside of our group or network.

• We should not limit ourselves by valuing only the professionalised perspective.

• We can build more power, by hearing more voices, and nurturing the ability to act.

• In discussions on this topic it will be useful to distinguish between different types of power – for example, power to do something, or power over others.

Next steps

We considered who else to invite into the group. Various suggestions were made, which Caroline and Steve will follow up together with Sue and Grace, and we will prepare a template invitation. We noted that we must not approach people expecting them to ‘represent’ a particular section of society. We are all engaging in a journey of exploration together, and bringing our various experiences and insights and connections to bear.

It was also noted that we could make contact with other agencies such as the Institute for Community Studies, Engage Britain, and also interact as much as possible with the SMK Sharing Power project.

Suggestions for discussion topics at future meetings were:

• How can we and others create inclusive conversations, which can drive change?

• As organisations are being ‘remade’ in response to the Covid-19 crisis, how can we and others do so in ways which share power better?

There is a lot of relevant experience on these topics within the cell and in our wider network. We agreed that we should make sure our discussion is well-grounded by assembling a collection of relevant practice examples, examining some in depth. Several members offered to produce blogs or video clips, and it was suggested that we could use the hashtag #sharingpower to disseminate learning from the cell and open up the conversations more widely.

Next meetings: 

• Wednesday 22 July, 2.00-3.30pm

• Wednesday 16 September, 2.00-3.30pm

Note from an online meeting: Voice as Value

Summary

•  Voice as value creates personal agency and can be transformative for individuals.

• When voice as value is placed at the heart of an organisation’s work that can also be transformative for society. 

• Organisations can:

  • Build relationships and trust over time with those they work with, and learn to listen to them properly.

  • Build alliances between people with direct lived experience and people who don’t have that experience but want to help bring about change.

  • Ensure that voices which would otherwise not be heard are listened to in the places where power is held.

• More voices are being heard in COVID-19 but we need to hear many more.

• We need many voices but one struggle.   

In more detail…

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the discussion. The theme of voice as value lies at the heart of the Better way Call to Action. This calls for a radical shift to liberate the power of connection and community.  That power is created when

• ‘Everyone is heard and believed in, given a fair opportunity to thrive, and the ability to influence the things that matter to them.’

So this is not just about raising voices, it is also about being heard, being listened to. We therefore need action to create platforms and channels for people to influence what matters to them, and to ensure that organisations are genuinely listening to and reflecting the people they serve in everything they do. 

Caroline also suggested that this is a moment when we are hearing more voices in the media, which were rarely heard before, for example care workers and nurses, and on occasion people who are homeless, people who are patients, people in difficulties. And we are also seeing a disconnect between the high-level statements by ‘men in suits’ and what people are saying on the ground about their real life experience of what is happening.

Margo Horsley, founder and former CEO of the charity Fixers pointed to the deficit of trust in institutions across the country.  When trust declines, that affects legitimacy: if people don’t trust one person in an institution, they often don’t trust anyone in the institution, and become less likely to share their knowledge. As a result institutions (including charities) are failing to learn and benefit from their citizens, their beneficiaries, their clients, their customers, and the wider public.

The solution, says Margo, is Voice as Value: people trusting each other and people listening to each other to enable and value voice. Democracy is based on the offer of voice, but so often at the same time voice is taken away. Attempts are made to consult but people see through it quickly. They learn that when they speak it doesn’t mean anything.

So, can institutions reshape to make themselves ready to listen? They need to start with individual voice. When a single person moves us through their story, in the first instance the value is to the individual.  They can tell they have been listened to because the institution changes what it does.  The individual feels valued, maybe for the very first time. When a person feel valued, he or she begins to feel that they have a stake in society, they can value someone else when they speak. They start to think about solutions, about how to transform things for others. And they may begin to start to trust in institutions that they hadn’t trusted until now.

So individual voice creates an opportunity.  But can society build on individual transformations? Margo saw the potential for this in the Fixers movement which began in 2008. It worked with thousands of young people which put ‘voice as value’ at its heart. Organisational boundaries were few and not visible. Young people described the organisation as having their backs and getting behind them. The premise of Fixers was that anyone 16 to 25 could do anything they wanted to providing they made a difference to one person. For the majority of young people who joined in, something had happened to them that they didn’t want to happen to someone else. Fixers worked with them so they could tell their story and supported them to meet the people they believed could take steps, with them, to create the change they wanted.

As a result, young people:

• Moved from being isolated to being connected (finding others who relate to or understood their experience, developing awareness of themselves and others);

• Moved from dependency to independence (they had authority and agency as an adult);

• Moved from inaction to action (becoming confident, experiencing change in themselves and acting upon it);

• Moved from the edge to the centre (they are the focus of positive attention, a source of guidance and expertise);

• Moved from uncertainty to certainty (understanding their place in society; seeing others’ opinions and judgements; finding their identity and the value of their experience to society);

• Moved from being controlled to taking control (seeing their self-identity as different from the circumstances they found themselves in, exerting agency and choice, discovering and creating options for change).

Margo believes that, not least at this time of Covid-19 crisis, voice as value can sit at the heart of transforming lives and that by enabling individuals to have their voices valued, they can contribute to a transformation of society: ‘A new framework of meaning where voice as value sits at the heart of social action.’

Polly Neate, CEO of Shelter agreed that trust is fundamental and hard-won for any organisation. Authentic voice is incredibly important, she said, and even more so in this crisis, and CEOs can play their part in this.

Individual stories have a vital role to play in influencing government. Polly pointed to four ways to exert influence, through evidence, social justice, personal stories, and economic argument. With the current government the last two are most important. However, some issues, including housing, become highly politicised along party lines. This is difficult to navigate, and brings risk, when we provide a platform for someone else to have a voice. Organisations need to be willing to accept such risk.

Polly advocated the principle of ‘many voices, one struggle’. Shelter has been working with media platform Tortoise, to allow unheard voices to emerge. One criticised Shelter, but that didn’t matter because the overwhelming case people made was about the disastrous impact of the crisis on individuals and on making people homeless, and that was what needed to be said. 

Shelter has also been giving a platform on social media for front line staff.  This empowers different voices within the organisation, diffusing power within the organisation.

There is an opportunity for transformation coming out of this crisis, even though this will be difficult, and will require a huge diversity of voices, and a real clarity about the nature of the struggle.

How can we create conditions to encourage voice and to listen better?

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the question,’ How can we create conditions to encourage voice and to listen better?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion facilitated by Steve Wyler, Better Way co-convenor, included the following points:

• Organisations should distinguish between different purposes of voice. For example applying voice to promote campaigns or demonstrate what an organisation is doing, is very different from enabling voice to have a say in improving lives, communities, and services. 

• Designers and commissioners of services need to hear voices right at the beginning, rather than when it is too late to influence and change.

• Not everyone is confident to give their voice in a public forum. Stories are often personal, and some people will need support and encouragement. Video messages can work especially well for this.

• How can an organisation truly listen? To do so implies rethinking mission and purpose. True listening is most likely to happen when organisations don’t have their own specific agenda, but rather create platforms which enable or facilitate people to advance their own issues, and bring about the changes they themselves want to see.

• Listening well is deeply challenging for organisations, and requires a whole new set of skills, including the listening skills taught in community organising (eg Otto Scharmer on the four levels of listening). Organisations face risks of being confronted by demands they can’t meet or problems where they can’t offer a solution. Listeners have to learn to be honest.

• We should recognise the legitimacy of the contribution both of people who have direct experience and who want to be heard, and those who don’t have direct experience but who feel strongly about the need for change. Both are needed to bring about social change.

• Organisations can help people to tell their story, they are not architects of their story. They can build scaffolding outside the structures of power, helping people up to the right floor and the right room, so their voices can be heard.  Organisations should not become gatekeepers that find a voice, polish it and coach it, and use it for their own organisational ends. 

• The use of the term representative is not helpful, better to think of advocates instead.  Voices of lived experience are personal, can change over time, and cannot be expected to represent a whole class or category of people.  

• Sharing many stories and experience that otherwise wouldn’t be heard, has its own intrinsic value in helping to build momentum for change. The more the better.

• We can recognise the power of listening to help people come together and create common cause and purpose. There are examples in the pandemic where the media are creating platforms for young people, for example, to get their messages heard. Young people on the ground feel they are being dictated to.  For some people the current experiences are the ordinary and they don’t want that ordinary to return. This needs to be heard and understood if we are to change things for the better.

• If people who have lived experience can’t convince people who don’t have that experience for the need to change, there won’t be a change. For fundamental radical change to happen there has to be a large number of people wanting it. So organisations which can provide routes for the voices of lived experience to convince others are very valuable. They shouldn’t be embarrassed about their own power but should use it in the right way, to help the people they work with become stronger, and to engage others with influence and resources.

• Above all there is the need to build relationships with people with different voices and build trust over time.  Not all organisations are good at doing this.  Some don’t really trust their beneficiaries. They are not willing to take the risk that beneficiaries will tell them that what they are doing is not what they ought to be doing. This doesn’t produce an adult relationship. 

• Funders could explicitly prioritise organisations where voice and lived experience is at the heart of the work that is delivered.  There are examples of this, but this is an approach which is not yet widespread among funders, and needs to be encouraged further.

Caroline concluded by saying that we will take forward some of these discussions in forthcoming Better Way activities, including cells on ‘sharing power to create new platforms and channels for people to be heard’, and another on ‘changing the narrative which sees people at the problem’. We welcome further blogs and video clips on these topics.

Note from an online roundtable: Coronavirus - building community and connection 2

Note of a second online roundtable on the coronavirus crisis and the power of connection and community, 12 May 2020

1.      SUMMARY

Once again, many people came to join us to talk about the Covid-10 crisis and the power of connection and community - we started with speakers who set the scene, then went into four breakout groups, and came back into a plenary discussion in which the groups reported back. The key messages were that:

• Sometimes positive, radical change does come out of national crisis, but we can’t take this for granted – it takes hard work and it remains most likely that inequality will get worse, not better as a result of the crisis;

• Together and individually we can build a compelling story of the changes we want to see;

• New connections, collaborative leadership and stronger communities are being built, locally, and provide a potential platform and inspiration to others;

• If we can draw examples and key lessons from them together and share them, we can help build momentum for this change.

2.      IN MORE DETAIL

Caroline Slocock, co-convenor of the Better Way, introduced the discussion. She explained that this was a second meeting on Covid19 and the power of connection and community. Our Call to Action for a Better Way called for a radical shift to liberate the power of connection and community and in recent weeks across the country we have seen inspiring examples of this, despite physical distancing.

Our first meeting identified some things we would like to change for good and some things we want to work on (see appendix). At our first meeting we also told a tale of two possible futures: the first where we see far more connection and community, the second where things become more authoritarian and centralising. The danger is that in our excitement about the first we might ignore the powerful forces driving things in the direction of the second.

SHARING POWER

Nick Gardham, from Community Organisers, explained that the community organising network is concerned with the building of collective power, understood as the ability to act. That is, people coming together to mobilise around the things they care about. 

In this crisis communities have indeed organised to respond to the immediate challenges people are facing. Public bodies, especially local authorities, are catching up. In the best examples we have seen an organised but not professionalised response to tackling the crisis:

• In the Wirral three community organisations are working together and are running the council’s food distribution hub, providing over 7,000 food parcels. These have been recognised by the council as best-placed to respond to the crisis, because they are deeply rooted, committed to people, and hold the local relationships. The council has realised its best role is to sit behind with its infrastructure and facilitate and enable the response, not deliver it itself.

• In Haringey, the Selby Trust has operated in Tottenham for many years, is deeply rooted and trusted, and connected to hundreds of local groups. In the Covid-19 emergency, the Selby Trust has developed a collaborative approach with council-employed local area health co-ordinators and 31 mutual aid groups. 

However, there can be difficulties in ‘marrying’ the self-organised organic community-driven responses with the more formal and centralised approaches from local authorities. Some local authorities seem to have absolved themselves of responsibility and in some cases have been entirely absent. Some have placed great burdens on local groups. Those trying to contact the council have been passed from pillar to post. If some councils are not willing to engage, to enter into a community space, how can we encourage them to let go of their power?

We have seen the power of local and of neighbourly acts. A physically distant but neighbourly arm around people can be more powerful than action by local institutions. Some local authorities talk about ‘harnessing’ community driven efforts, but is that the best way of framing the relationship?

Furthermore, we need now to move beyond acts of neighbourliness to a shared conversation about social justice. This pandemic is not a leveller, and some sections of the community are deeply afflicted and hit hardest.  

CHANGING PRACTICES

Amy Middleton, from the Mayday Trust, explained that her organisation has adopted a model which is answerable to the people it works with and supports, rather than to prescriptive contracts. Covid-19 has tested the resolve to stay true to principles and not revert to traditional working by for example simply managing risk, as so often happens in a crisis. 

The Mayday Trust’s coaching teams, which provide person-led support for people experiencing tough times such as homelessness, have had to step back from face to face contact. How can they continue to provide meaningful coaching, not a tick box transactional service? The answer, it turns out, is to be led by the person and what they want, and to provide people with phones and other devices so they can be connected. The Mayday Trust has been able to make good use of small amounts of funding to help people pay internet charges and stay connected, and Amy hopes this type of funding will continue in future. 

The internet can be scary for some who have avoided it in the past. But this crisis can be an opportunity to learn online skills. While we all understand the value of face-to-face contact it should be recognised that some people find that difficult, and the Mayday Trust is discovering that in those cases relationships can grow positively when the pressure for face-to-face meetings is removed. 

If we are to help people thrive not just cope, we must stop seeing those we work with as vulnerable. Tough times and social isolation are not new for many people, and we need to allow people to exercise choice and control over their situation, not jump in to fix things. In recent weeks some of the people the Mayday Trust works with have applied to volunteer with NHS or other voluntary groups, becoming the person offering help rather than being on the receiving end only. Services need to recognise better that the people they work with are valuable and that they have assets they can offer their community.

WE CANNOT JUST WILL A BETTER WORLD

Duncan Shrubsole from the Lloyds Bank Foundation has recently written a blog for the Better Way, offering personal reflections.  In some charity circles, he said, there much talk about opportunities to do things differently, but a willing a better world is not enough, it will be a long hard slog. And we should not underestimate the negative effect of Covid-19.  It has made many things even worse, including economic exclusion, loneliness and isolation, domestic abuse, and the experience of BME communities.

Duncan’s blog addresses five topics:

• Some really basic things need fixing and fast. The social care system is in a mess, benefits are too threadbare, and we haven’t invested enough in public services.

• We need to better understand our society and economy as an ecosystem and to support and nourish it as such. We need both well-funded public services and effective and responsible businesses to do what they can best. We must fix the relationship between the centre and the local: we shouldn’t be helping people in poverty through local foodbanks, we should be doing it through a national benefits system; and we shouldn’t be mobilising volunteers through a centralised app, but rather through local charity responses. Moreover, the role of the charity and voluntary sector in the ecosystem need to be better understood, not least by the Treasury.

• Understanding and shaping public opinion is vital. The slogan ‘stay home and save lives’ has been powerful. We need to carry people with us.

• If we want to build a better world, we cannot just will it, we have to make it happen. It is wrong to see the NHS and welfare state as an inevitable consequence of the Second World War. People had to work from the 1930s onwards to make the case, and to withstand those who said we are bankrupt and we don’t have the money.

• This crisis has revealed the multiple roles we each individually play and need to play. We work in organisations, we are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and we are also neighbours. We need to understand and bring to bear the multiple roles we play. ‘To thine whole selves be true,’ suggested Duncan. 

HOW CAN WE CREATE A LASTING EFFECT?

Participants broke into smaller groups to discuss the question, ‘What can we do now and in the coming weeks to create a lasting effect?’ Feedback from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent discussion, included the following points:

• Shifting behaviours: It is not enough to just look at the surface, where we see many different activities. We need to look underneath to see the shift in behaviours and attitudes. The crisis is showing an innate wish for people to help, trust and look after each other. We need to build on these instincts, in which there is a huge national interest, eg the Queen saying ‘the streets are not empty, but filled with love’.

• New collaborative partnerships, relationships and new ways of working: These are forming, and old rules, hierarchies and barriers to change are being abandoned, as a result of the crisis, though this is not true everywhere. Organisations are finding new ways of working and changing their practices for the good. We must capture and build on this, and inspire others to show what is possible.

• Changing the language: We are finding language is important. ‘Organised’ not ‘professionalised’ activity is what works, community organisers have found, and this phrase signals that mutual aid and other local organisation do need organisation and investment, which some think is not required.  ‘Neighbour to neighbour’ groups or ‘neighbour activists’ rather than ‘volunteers,’ which has Victorian connotations, are terms being adopted in some places. One organisation told us they decided not to use the NHS volunteers, as they think it is better to use local people:  local connections and relationships build and strengthen communities with lasting effect. 

• Telling the stories: If we are to achieve a shift in behaviour, and future investment in favour of community and connection, we must tell our stories well. We need a new narrative/framing strategy which recognises that we are in the same storm but different boats. We can produce a clear and effective narrative, using advice from the Frameworks Institute. We should recognise that human emotion, not just rational argument, is needed to make change happen. We will need to find ways to shift the conversation so that people who don’t want to engage with the Better Way thinking will feel that they must

• Recognising and tackling inequality: This crisis is increasing division and injustice, and as we move into recession this is likely to become even worse. We should expose this, and not allow injustice to remain hidden. But we can also draw on the best examples of recent practice to show that it is possible to reduce inequality in future, and build a fairer world. 

• Acting urgently: The desire to get back to ‘normal’ will be strong. We have a short timescale, maybe six weeks before we start to drift back again to old ways, it was suggested. So we will have to act with urgency

• Organising well and effectively: It took huge preparatory effort to create the NHS and the welfare state, with sustained effort, detailed policy proposals and implementation plans. We will need to be similarly well organised if we want to bring about change at scale. And we should remember that many elements of the infrastructure and many of the models of working that we will need for the future do already exist, at least in part.

• Recognising the limitations of this moment: History indicates that out of national crisis significant change can come, but that can’t be taken for granted. We are not at an ‘Atlee moment’, it was suggested, and the conditions do not seem favourable for a national government-led effort in favour of a more equitable society. But it was also felt there has never been a perfect time to build a better life. So we must not underestimate the scale of the challenge, and we will have to be smart in building our collective desire for something better.

• Starting with ourselves: We need to start with ourselves. We can look at our own organisations and consider what can change, and understand better what the people we work with, and our communities, want. We can achieve a lot by working together, as a network, bringing about real change within our sphere of influence.  

• Going beyond our own immediate circle: We should not just talk to ourselves, we can also influence others. We don’t need to start from scratch. The innate desire to be useful, and for basic fairness, is not found only in the social sector, nor only on the ‘progressive left’. We can recognise and build on the power of long term relationships, across sectors, and use this opportunity, when professional boundaries have often been set aside, to break down barriers. And as Duncan says, by being true to our ‘whole selves’, we can make connections well beyond our immediate work roles.

• Finding common cause between community action and local government: Some local councils do understand that it is possible to seek out and build on the shared assets that exist in communities. We can do more to work with them, and to create the conditions for more to follow.

• Building the network: We should recognise that many people are incredibly busy at this time, providing services and supporting people as best they can. For many, it is difficult to find time to think beyond the immediate challenges, but the desire to do so is very high. This is the value of a network like the Better Way. This is an important time for existing members to encourage more people to join, not least from the public and private sectors.

• Sharing and promoting examples of positive action: As a network, we should not feel too diffident. A few people with a strong shared vision can sometimes bring about huge change. We need to tell strong and compelling stories, wherever we can. We can capture and highlight what is being achieved now when there is a shared sense of purpose, as a guide to how things can be done better locally and nationally in future. With others, the Better Way can highlight what’s working and tell the story of what’s possible based on what’s already starting to happen now, and our members can help by providing video clips and blogs.

We agreed we should organise a further meeting, in a few weeks’ time; and we’ll aim to bring in more members from the public sector. One topic might be: ‘How can we build on the collaborative leadership that is already happening in the crisis so that we #changeforgood.

Note from an online meeting: Removing the barriers between services and campaigning

Note of a Better Way roundtable on ‘Removing the barriers between services and campaigning’, held on-line on 21 April 2020

Fifteen people, from across the country, participated in this discussion, which was introduced by Steve Wyler, co-convenor of the Better Way. He explained that at the launch event of the Call to Action for a Better Way, in November last year, several people spoke of their desire for those working in the social sector to be bolder, and to break down the barriers between services and campaigning.

Sue Tibballs, from the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, made the opening presentation.

• She pointed out that it is often thought that there are two traditions in the social sector: on the one hand charity (the provision of immediate relief) and on the other social reform (working for long term change). Typically, the one is transactional, the other transformational. This Sue said, is a false dichotomy, and she described it as a weed that needs to be pulled up.

• In recent years, Sue explained, the social sector has moved towards the charity model, believing it can secure more money by positioning itself to deliver commissioned services, employing professional fundraisers, and telling the story of its work in ways which drive fundraising income, rather than bringing about more radical social change.

• At the same time there has been a narrowing of what people think campaigning is, an assumption it is confined to public affairs and lobbying. The social sector’s models of leadership have narrowed as well, so that it looks for those who have managerial strengths, and not necessarily those who will be bold and brave. 

• In the last decade or so we have seen the emergence of a ‘sock-puppet narrative’, which asserts that those in receipt of public funds should not use those funds for campaigning, and it has become even more difficult to be seen to be ‘biting the hand that feeds you’. The social sector was told to ‘stick to the knitting’ and largely obeyed, and kept its head down.

• This means that the sector has lost much of its power to deliver on its mission and drive transformational change. 

• Yet, as a sector, it is not just here to pick up the pieces, it is here to build a better world.

• Most change proceeds from personal experience. Campaigning takes many forms and is not just about public affairs and policy. By believing that it is, the social sector has become a supplicant to government, and petitions rather than makes demands.  Yet history tells us that civil society drives many changes and that governments do respond to pressure from civil society.

• The language of ‘campaigning’ is difficult, and Sue has found that the term ‘social change’ allows more people to engage.

• There are organisations which are rethinking their approach, many of whom are service providers, using their experience and evidence to drive systemic change. Some are able to work in mature partnership with the state, respectful of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and working to shared outcomes. Others are holding the state to account, by bringing challenge. And the best manage to do both.

• Some use the term social influencing. Others describe themselves as social activists, and see themselves not as providers but enablers. And for some campaigning has become a service, providing encouragement and resources for people to be agents of their own change.

• If we don’t sort this out, Sue said, the writing is on the wall. Much significant change is coming from outside the formal social sector. When private companies are using purpose to sell product, and activism is adopted by the private sector, just when it becomes illicit in charity, we must know that something is wrong, and it is time, said Sue, to ‘take our purpose back.’

Steve thanked Sue, and he noted that in response to the coronavirus emergency we have seen a great number of formal and informal organisations step forward and provide immediate services, but also, woven into that, many are also trying to make change. For example, the scandal of what is happening in care homes was exposed by charities speaking out, sometimes at risk to their own funding, and the organisation Charities So White has drawn national attention to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BAME communities.

The meeting then divided into three breakout groups, to allow everyone to contribute. The following points emerged from the breakout sessions, and the subsequent plenary discussions, facilitated by Caroline Slocock, Better Way co-convenor:

Rediscovering purpose as social change organisations

• The social sector would benefit from an organisational framework where social change becomes the overriding objective, and services are seen as a means to achieve that objective, in authentic ways. 

• Organisations which give a prominent role to lived experience in their service design and delivery may be less likely to act in a paternalistic way and more likely to be contributing to transformational change, it was felt.

• Service delivery organisations not only have responsibility to help the individuals they currently work with, they also have responsibility to help the next generation.

• Some charities have adopted right-based models of working.  Sometimes this has always been implicit, but at other times it has been made explicit. Mention was made of the cross-sectarian work of Bernadette McAliskey in the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme, an organisation which regards the UN Conventions on Human Rights as its constitution.

Understanding systems change

• If we fail to make change happen we fail the people we work with, by keeping them stuck in a detrimental system, where inequality persists. Our role, it was proposed, must be to become systems change leaders.

• We noted that ‘systems thinking’ has become fashionable, as a means to bring about social progress when faced with complexity. While this may be welcome, its practical application is not always clear. Does it imply a different way of working with individuals, or does it require a wider change in how organisations and institutions operate? Or both?

Being more outspoken, and also influencing behind the scenes

• The voices of the social sector are too often those of professional people and as a result are too often sanitised. We need to allow more authentic voices to be heard, loud and clear.

• On the other hand, there are times when charities can influence change in quiet ‘covert’ ways, or change the conversation, and this should be recognised too.

The implications of funding practice

• The funding community has a big responsibility, it was argued. Many organisations are funded only to deliver services, or only to pursue innovation in service delivery. They are rarely funded to act as campaigners or influencers.  

• On the other hand, some suggested that charities are too much inclined to blame their shortcoming on funders. This betrays, it was felt, a lack of their own bravery.

• Inevitably some organisations will have embedded relationships with funders and will find it harder to ‘bite the hand that feeds them’, while others are relatively free from funder dependency, and can be more easily outspoken. It was suggested that these types of organisations could be encouraged to work together more, so that the respective strengths can be combined.

What prevents organisations acting as agents of social change?

• There are vested organisational interests in maintaining the status quo, i.e. only addressing the manifestations of social problems, and never addressing the underlying causes, or failing to create opportunities for people to make change happen themselves. After all, it was suggested, social sector jobs depend on the problems persisting.

• Services that support people, public or social sector, continue to stigmatise people, when we should be helping them claim their rights. We fail to employ people we serve, or appoint them to our Boards, and maintain a ‘them and us’ way of working. We label people as ‘vulnerable’, but inherently they are not, we make them so.

• We also noted, that in the current crisis, statutory bodies appear to be referring fewer people to independent advocacy services, thereby stifling challenge and reinforcing inequality and unfairness.

It was suggested that the Better Way, with others, could help to build up examples of organisations which are moving from a narrow service delivery model to one which where services become a contribution to transformational social change objectives. It was felt that this could be an important contribution to shaping the post COVID-19 world. 

Final reflections from Sue Tibballs

This is a rich and important conversation, Sue noted. We do need to keep challenging ourselves. But also the crisis has revealed what others think about the social sector, she felt. The Chancellor invoked Victorian language when he spoke about ‘the gentleness of charity’, and, even though governments had pushed social market models so much in recent years, social enterprises have been hung out to dry.

We should say as a sector that we are about change and delivering social value and social good, and everything in our organisations must integrate in pursuit of that. Campaigning is one method, when there is something identifiable that can be changed in a fixed period of time, and where the campaign is winnable. If we understand that our organisations exist for change, than everything we do can be seen as contributing to that, not only when we run a campaign.

Sue also suggested that the social sector should change the way it describes itself, and not be known as the charity sector, or the voluntary sector, or the third sector, but as the social sector. And explain that the social sector works within civil society, and that it is about social good and social value. Yes, she acknowledged, it is ambitious to encourage shared language, but it would serve the sector well to do so.