Community Power: How to…Start!

New Local’s senior practice lead Catriona Maclay explains how Wealden District Council is charting its path to community power using transparent, collaborative self-evaluation.

How do you kick off a community powered approach? Council teams might be sold on the idea, but it can feel abstract and even daunting to start work on. Working with New Local, Wealden District Council (WDC) is experimenting with one bold approach to tackling that challenge, by exploring opportunities to co-produce with communities from the start.

Through a series of workshops, the council took stock of how different partners see the council’s work, and what that means for future priorities. The workshops were based around a “Community Power maturity model” that New Local has started to develop, tailored to Wealden District Council’s context. We know from our members across the country that officers and councillors need practical tools to map out and develop a tangible vision of what community power means for councils and their residents. What will it look and feel like to residents? What does community power mean for service delivery? A maturity model creates a shared language to track and plan progress.

Delivering effective public services and creating thriving places relies on a complex web of relationships and networks

Every community and council is different, so it’s important to tailor these ideas to the diverse priorities of different locations. In Wealden, we identified five areas to prioritise: strategy, organisational culture, the role of elected councillors, service delivery and community culture. For each area, we mapped out a hypothesis of what you would see as the council moved from their starting point, to one where there is potential, a commitment has been made, or there is transformative change.

Communities and partners need to tell their side of the story.

The important step that WDC took wasn’t just setting out the model. The council recognised that to really understand what’s going on, communities and partners need to tell their side of the story. So over the course of two workshops, we explored the status quo in Wealden along with participants from voluntary and community groups, statutory partners and faith groups together with the council officers and elected representatives already at the heart of the council’s activities. Working in small mixed-background groups and discussing in the round, participants shared their assessments across the five priority areas; how and why perspectives might differ; current good practice; and priorities for the future.

New Local is now working to turn participants’ insights into a concrete roadmap for Wealden’s community-power journey. Three lessons jump out from our time in Wealden so far:

• Bringing people together is both the method and the outcome: What participants most enjoyed about the sessions was the chance to work with each other. They told us that the energy and ideas they heard from each other invigorated their own understanding of the shared challenges they face, and helped them spot new opportunities to tackle them together. We know that delivering effective public services and creating thriving places relies on a complex web of relationships and networks, and strengthening those links can start immediately alongside strategising and planning.

• Different perspectives strengthen analysis: Internal and external participants sometimes had different opinions on how things were going, and discussions helped tease out where intentions and reality don’t match up. Perhaps just as interesting as differing opinions were the moments when perspectives were agreed, but each side added rich insight as to the causes or implications of that issue – each of which are vital to creating the conditions for change. Different participants’ perceptions weren’t predictable, allowing for dissent, alignment and positive surprises. By rooting their plans in broader perspectives, councils can identify how to move forward grounded in experiences and insights from across the organisation, communities and partners.

• Communities are hungry to contribute: Participants from across the district told us that they were excited about the potential of a new approach. While there was realism about the challenges facing community groups and the conditions for success that would be needed to make it possible for communities to contribute, groups shared rich knowledge and ideas for better ways of working together. Whether making connections to other groups, co-delivering services, collaborating on shared endeavours or continuing to engage in strategy, communities are often ready to engage with councils in a new way.

We can see how the vibrant and thoughtful community groups active in Wealden are already spotting and acting on the opportunities they see. An important next step will be further broadening the groups who are involved in working with the council, focusing on groups whose voices haven’t been included so far.

We’ll be publishing more about Wealden’s journey – and about the Community Power maturity model – as our work progresses. In the meantime, if you would like to use this approach to map your own community power journey, we’d love to hear from you.

Join our mailing list