What have we learnt?

Too much power over people is hoarded in government, institutions and the wealthy - whether it be money, assets, data, knowledge, influence or control - and we need to share it. But people who feel powerless often have more power than they realise – for example, personal agency, collective power, and the power of imagination and belief in a better world. There is much that we can do to build power with people. 

Over the last year, we’ve learnt three key things:

1. Sharing power requires awareness and new tools
   Each of us can play a part, by understanding the sources of power and privilege, including our own, and identifying the blockages that prevent power from being shared. 
   

2. Authentic voices can challenge existing sources of power
   Authentic voices stemming from personal experience can challenge existing sources of power, if they are not used in a tokenistic way. Storytelling ‘from the heart’ can be powerful.
   

3. Connecting people creates power
   Connecting people – for example, through networks, coalitions and activities that link people together – creates new forms of power. Communities themselves also generate power, sometimes out of negative experiences, as Covid-19 has shown.

What can we do?

Here are some things we’ve identified that everyone can do – service providers, charities, central and local government and public agencies, private companies and funders too, and we’ll be exploring further how to do these things well, as well as investigating new ideas:

Tools to share power

• Decentralise power according to the principle of subsidiarity, with more power given to communities whilst also delivering system-wide change.

• Bring people in: institutions across all sectors, including funders and commissioners, can share power by bringing people from across society including those with lived experience into policy-making, planning and design, making space for reflective practice together.

• Analyse data about services and organisations to improve awareness of how power operates and build new frameworks of accountability to those served. 

• Embrace a social purpose for businesses, so that they work for communities and a healthy planet, rather than damaging them - for example by becoming social enterprises, co-operatives and B-Corps, and by making impact investing the new normal.

• Ease bureaucracy and funding restrictions. Trust a little more, control a little less!
  

Authentic voices to challenge power

• Support and encourage unheard voices and create platforms for them to be heard.

• Let people tell their own story, linking it to the need for wider systemic change.
  

Connecting people

• Build communities of place and interest, creating more networks, coalitions, campaigns, community hubs and shared activities, with a key role for civil society and funders.

• Invest in participative democracy. At local government level, we need new structures to enable meaningful collaboration and participation with social partners and communities, with funding and teeth, along with investment to build the capacity to engage.

• Encourage shared assets that give communities power, for example through community ownership.

• Link up different institutions locally to build agency and power for the benefit of the whole community.