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How can services and communities collaborate to improve wellbeing? Lessons from Wales

August 14, 2024   By Charlotte Morgan, Wales Centre for Public Policy

By listening to and valuing the insights of communities, the public sector can build better services, improve outcomes and use limited resources more wisely. But what are the essential ingredients for effective collaboration? And how can you overcome barriers to participation? Charlotte Morgan shares findings from Wales.

Effective collaboration between public sector organisations and communities is vital to support community action and increase community wellbeing. It is essential to know not just what good collaboration looks like but how you achieve it. The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) and the Resourceful Communities Partnership (RCP) have been working together on research to identify evidence-informed actions that public services and communities can take to better engage and collaborate with each other in a meaningful way that achieves both wellbeing benefits and the effective use of limited resources.

In Wales, there is a desire to do things differently when it comes to delivering services collaboratively, and we have the infrastructure in place to enable this. The importance of community wellbeing and partnership working is enshrined in a number of statutory duties. Within the ground breaking Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, having a Wales of cohesive communities is listed as one of the seven wellbeing goals. The Act also requires public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions and to work better together and with people and communities to tackle persistent problems such as poverty and health inequalities.

Evidence suggests that effective collaboration can not only improve the quality of service provision but can also provide a way of spending money differently in local government to achieve better outcomes. As public services in Wales and elsewhere navigate fiscal constraints, it is important that they both support and effectively collaborate with communities.

What enables effective multisector collaboration?

We reviewed evidence published since the Covid-19 pandemic on how multisector collaboration impacts community action and wellbeing. This included practice-based case studies provided by public and community organisations in Wales, UK grey literature, and academic sources. We examined how features of effective collaboration such as leadership, trust, and mutuality, and supporting factors like cross-organisational capacity, funding, and social capital can be developed in various contexts. We identified actions for effective collaboration, categorised into activities to develop a shared purpose, flexible governance arrangements, and financial mechanisms supporting collaborative work.

Actions and functions underpinning effective collaboration

Actions for effective collaboration

  1. Developing a shared purpose involves activities like listening exercises and engagement events, and mechanisms (such as online platforms and partnership meetings) for information sharing. Systems thinking and mapping activities, where stakeholders contribute to a shared understanding of local issues and assets, and long-term planning with co-developed goals, are important. Key features of effective collaboration – such as trust and mutuality – often emerged as a product of these activities for developing shared purpose.
  2. Effective governance ensures the shared purpose of collaboration remains central through clear roles, responsibilities and processes that facilitate the achievement of this purpose, with sufficient flexibility for adaptation. Liaison roles were crucial connectors between public services and communities and shared decision-making enabled greater equity of participation. Policies and procedures could be a hinderance, compromising trust and flexibility, but could be supportive where they formalise time and resource commitments and create cultures of collaboration. Regional and national bodies can also play important linking roles.
  3. Financial mechanisms can be enablers or barriers to collaboration, depending on how they are designed. There is a need for a mix of funding types, including flexible, secure and longer term grant funding that promotes collaboration and community wealth building.

Sense-checking our findings: what works where?

To sense-check these findings in practice, WCPP and the RCP co-facilitated an interactive online workshop (January 2024) with over 70 participants interested in multisector collaboration to support community wellbeing. The aim was to understand how different actions for collaboration suit various aims and contexts. Participants highlighted how actions from the review could fit collaborations of varying maturity, resources, infrastructures, relationships, and geographical areas, and also identified additional actions for effective collaboration.

Collaborative practice in Wales

The strong engagement highlighted a desire among public services and community organisations to bolster their understanding of how to collaborate effectively. Wales benefits from having cross-sectoral forums, such as the RCP which is jointly chaired by Building Communities Trust and Pembrokeshire County Council. The RCP is uniquely able to promote and share learning on good practice in community-based delivery of public services, playing a key role in bridging policy and practice, with over 150 members from across local government, the public, third and community sectors, academia and national policymaking bodies.

Within Wales, RCP is unique as a forum where those promoting community wellbeing on both sides of the public/third sector divide collaborate and share experiences and practice. It has done a huge amount to build mutual understanding and a sense of what is possible among its many participants – and having its work underpinned by quality research makes it stronger still.

Chris Johnes, Chief Executive, Building Communities Trust

The collaboration between the RCP and WCPP stemmed from a shared commitment to evidence-based practice to consider ‘what actions support multisector collaboration to enhance community action and improve community wellbeing?’ A co-designed project from the outset, it began by establishing the shared goals and values essential for success. A key aim of the collaborative approach was to improve the relevance of research to practice contexts. The approach allowed for the pooling of knowledge and expertise that really focussed the research and its findings on what key practitioners in Wales would find most useful.

The very nature of this research embraces the spirit of collaboration and cross-sectoral partnerships. Through its design, implementation and dissemination, WCPP has taken a co-productive approach to working alongside public and community sector organisations to develop research that not only adds to the existing knowledge base around multi-sector collaboration, but which offers practical, evidence-based findings that can be implemented by the different stakeholders to influence change and improve wellbeing outcomes for communities across Wales.

Rhian Bennett, Senior Commissioning Manager, Pembrokeshire County Council

The workshop shone a light on the brilliant collaborative work that is being done across Wales and the motivation that public services and community organisations have for ensuring that collaborative endeavours are effective and long-lasting. Discussions between public services, third sector and community organisations in Wales at the workshop also highlighted that we need more effective ways of working together, and the RCP provides one important mechanism for this. It is essential to harness the inherent resilience and capability of communities to support public services that may be struggling to meet evolving needs and effective and meaningful collaboration is key to achieving this.

Public sector bodies face reducing budgets and increasing demands. One way of balancing the books is to do less – cutting services, raising eligibility criteria, reducing costs. The other way is to see the crisis as a driver for innovation and work with voluntary & community organisations to co-create new place-based service delivery models that harness community strengths and assets to meet individual needs. This can only happen if there is effective collaboration between local government and communities as equal partners. The resources developed by WCPP and the RCP will definitely help.

Sue Leonard, Chief Officer, Pembrokeshire Association of Voluntary Services

One key aspect that emerged from the research and the workshop is the need to effectively empower communities without placing the entire burden on their shoulders – for public services to work with communities to address local issues rather than commission them to do it for them.

We have developed a ‘framework for action’ that aims to support public services to better understand how collaboration can work and what actions can be taken in different contexts. This is not a comprehensive list of possible actions but offers a starting point for thinking not just about what good collaboration looks like, but how to get there in practice. You can also read our full report here.


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