How We Did It: Igniting the power of place through strategic working with communities and within partnerships
Creating thriving places through community collaboration is a priority for many local authorities, particularly during local government reorganisation.
At this How We Did It we invited Claire Notman, Senior Manager, Communities, at Westmorland and Furness Council to discuss their strategy ‘Together we are powered by communities’.
Interview highlights
About the journey of the approach
Being a new organisation really gave an opportunity to get under the skin of what was working, what wasn’t working and why. Following the transition to a unitary authority on April 1, 2023, Westmorland and Furness Council prioritised communities.
Building on work started by the shadow authority, the council collaborated with New Local to shape a new strategy.
It was a good opportunity to look at all the amazing work already happening and to move forward and shape what we wanted to progress.
Between April 2023 and July 2024, the council and New Local conducted extensive engagement, including drop-in sessions, outreach, and strategic partner workshops, to establish strong foundations for the strategy and ensure the approach was grounded in genuine community insight.
The three core strands of the strategy
- For the community, by the community: Recognising and elevating existing community-led action.
- Getting alongside communities: Supporting groups with the tools to progress their ideas while knowing when the council should step back
- Everyone reaching out, everyone reached: Enabling all communities to feel able to change things for the better. Providing more targeted support for those in need – such as their project on income maximisation and collaboration with the Poverty Truth Commission – to ensure every resident has a voice.
Strategy Delivery – It’s the delivery that matters most
What began as a high-level outline has evolved into a comprehensive delivery plan. In the first year, the council influenced service areas to rethink engagement; for example, working with the deaf community to reduce barriers to council services.
Dedicated communications support has helped us connect more effectively with communities. We’ve published case studies on a YouTube channel to celebrate local achievements and internal ways of working
We also introduced a partner steering group to make we were working in a community powered way, and that this wasn’t just a council-led initiative.
Ways to embed this way of working across the council
It was important to ensure we highlighted and celebrated all the community-focused work to demonstrate to staff where “community power” was already happening – and being clear that this was not a new initiative but about consistency in ways of working with our communities.
In partnership with New Local, we created a training programme and implemented a ‘train the trainer’ model to ensure our approach would be sustainable.
We also carried out service-specific facilitated discussions, ‘lunch and learns’ and aligned our training with work already in place.
Our cultural shift has been supported by our Chief Executive and elected members, who have aligned community power with the council’s core priorities.
Evidencing the impact of the strategy
Impact is measured through a delivery plan dashboard and a “maturity matrix” rather than simple metrics alone. By gathering data from annual reports and community programmes, the council tracks how working practices are evolving and how they benefit residents over time.
Next steps and advice
We need to keep going! Strategy is just the beginning and it’s about keeping that live and celebrating people and their successes. We are learning as we are going. Our delivery plan is for five years, and will evolve as we go. We’ve learned a lot from talking to other people and people have been generous with their time.
I would advise the following:
- The most important thing for me is building a shared understanding. Community Power, can mean different things to people, I remember a conversation early on where it came to light that a person I was talking to thought we were talking about generating power.
- Community Power can be a vague term, but people will understand it as you build knowledge.
- This is a long-term piece of work, working in local government we are sometimes against political cycles so getting that buy-in around that long-term nature of it is vital.
- It isn’t something that we can evidence immediately. We can evidence the number of people we’re working with, and we can do the case studies, but whole scale, change and impact take longer.
- It’s important to consider the delivery plan and know what will be needed going forward. We found being flexible and agile with what the organisation needs as you go is key. For example, if you need more resource at points in time for example for us this was as we developed the strategy and delivery plan.
Photo Credit: Image by Jonny Gios on Unsplash
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