How We Did It: Moving towards a neighbourhood strategy
Many councils are exploring neighbourhood ways of working that bring them closer to their communities. This shift presents exciting opportunities to strengthen relationships and deliver services more collaboratively alongside residents.
At this How We Did It, we put Alice Black, Sophie Taylor and Sue Sheehan in our hot seat to learn how the London Borough of Camden is embracing this approach. They shared insights into how their work has evolved in Kilburn and Kentish Town over the past few years.
Interview highlights
On creating local, connected, community-based services
Alice: We want our services to be local, connected and based on strong relationships in the community. We’ve been running lots of experiments in different places; part of the goal is for statutory services to become more connected into bottom-up initiatives.
Our neighbourhood’s approach at Camden really developed from our citizen’s assemblies that have taken place over the last three to four years and these conversations have highlighted a range of key priorities from our residents. We know that residents want to tell their story once, they want their individual needs to be recognised, and they want more support for vulnerable residents.
Having good relationships is really important, it’s not all about short term fixes – quite often we can’t achieve those. We share the problem, not just the solution.
On the four characteristics of Camden’s approach:
Alice: We want our support to be local and joined up, making sure services are really dynamic and responsive to local people and their needs. This means that communities can link into holistic support instead of needing to interact with services that have been historically siloed.
We want people to lead the change. Using culture to drive change is really important to us, with local people and staff being empowered to co-design the change that they want to see. We’ve been working with our staff to run test and learn experiments to make sure we’re drawing on what is best for our communities.
It’s key that services are responsive to the needs of the community, adapting and shifting flexibly rather than being centralised. We arealsoconnecting into community-based organisations. Working in a neighbourhood setting provides a small enough scale to enable people working in different parts of the system to get to know each other, creating better relationships between the VCS and our council services.
On building networks in Kilburn:
It’s now much easier for us to have a Kilburn wide conversation with people and it’s much easier for them to talk to us as well.
Sue: Kilburn is a very divided town – Kilburn High Road is a mile long, one side of the road is in Camden, the other side is in Brent. Post-COVID, Kilburn High Road was identified as a priority high street. When we started talking to communities, their biggest concern was that there’s no joined-up working. Who do they talk to? They might talk to their councillor or they might talk to a particular officer. We started networking with people and working out what the common themes were; I call it community organising. It’s now much easier for us to have a Kilburn wide conversation with people and it’s much easier for them to talk to us as well.
On the power of relationships:
Sue: We don’t have any funding, which has actually encouraged a more grassroots, network-driven approach. We’ve made friends with people, we hang out with them, we listen to them all the time. Having good relationships is really important, it’s not all about short term fixes – quite often we can’t achieve those. We share the problem, not just the solution.
While we haven’t established any formal governance or a constitution, we’ve been running for two years and continue to build around shared values, mission, and mutual respect. We know we don’t have everyone we need in the room yet, but we’re committed to listening, understanding different needs, and creating a space where people feel valued, included and positive about participating. Our aim is to help the community to get organised so that it can be a force for change.
Some of our most engaged residents in Kilburn on both sides of the road are saying that they feel a lot more hopeful. They feel that they can be part of positive change.
On what it means for residents in Kilburn:
Sue: Some of our most engaged residents in Kilburn on both sides of the road are saying that they feel a lot more hopeful. They feel that they can be part of positive change. They are starting to see changes in Kilburn already as a result of One Kilburn. People are now taking more risks for themselves and starting up their own social action projects. We also have a building that has a cafe, yoga and all sorts of play schemes.
On what the approach looks like in Kentish Town:
Sophie: In June 2023, Camden’s Supporting Communities strategy team brought together different staff from the housing and community services. This included our neighbourhood housing officers who work directly with tenants, community safety officers, repairs staff, and caretaking staff who look after the estates. We started by bringing them together in the same place, in a shared office space two days per week, but we knew that wasn’t going to do anything by itself. We began testing ways to support better collaboration, working together in a more positive way around some of our complex cases.
On reaching solutions together:
Sophie: We had the opportunity to test a devolved budget. The Kentish Town Housing and Community services team was given £10,000 to spend quickly in response to residents’ concerns without additional layers of bureaucracy. The budget has empowered staff and team managers to deal with issues they see on the ground, addressing things before they escalate and working in a more preventative way. We started with £10,000 and scaled up to £25,000, using the money to carry out work that wouldn’t otherwise get done.
We have also been able to test ways of connecting into our local community and voluntary sector. For example, we’ve tested neighbourhood connect sessions where local representatives of the voluntary sector have come in to share cases of residents they’re working with and get input from our housing and community services. They have been able to overcome barriers and reach solutions more quickly for residents. The sessions have really started to address the crossover between housing and health.
Working face to face creates empathy and helps us keep the resident at the centre of our work, which sums up what this piece of work is all about nicely.
On changing culture through trust:
Alice: We wanted to establish a really positive and strong empathetic working culture. That doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s probably taken about a year to get to that place, to build a good level of trust between teams. When we started in June 2023, teams didn’t really know what each other did so every Wednesday we began holding our working together sessions, helping teams work more reflectively using principles derived from social care. Working face to face creates empathy and helps us keep the resident at the centre of our work, which sums up what this piece of work is all about nicely.
On what comes next:
Sophie: We’re really excited about the new East Integrated Neighbourhood Team which brings together a group of health and care staff – adult social workers, mental health workers, GPs, occupational therapists, district nurses – in the same office space in Kentish Town Health Centre. They are building their identity around Camden East and the residents on their shared caseloads, spotting opportunities to join up with each other. We hope to be able to scale the approach across all the different neighbourhoods in Camden.
Photo credit: ‘Kilburn High Road‘ on Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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