Telling Your Story of Council and Place
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Councils have discovered that shared narratives – or put simply, stories – are powerful. As the pandemic showed in its early stages, a simple narrative can mobilise communities and inspire the workforce to extraordinary joint effort. Get the wider story right and it can also attract partners and investors to a place.
But developing an inspiring narrative is not as simple as brainstorming some ideas in a single meeting. The best stories are developed collaboratively with partners and communities, they draw on the history and future of a place and have an authenticity that stimulates action. Get it wrong and a story can come across as corporate, owned solely by the council and may alienate rather than inspire.
This session will explore how to co-produce a simple but authentic story of place that can help a council meet the big challenges ahead.
Participation in New Local events is free and exclusive to members of our Network. If you would like to find out more, please contact Francesca.
“Do not miss a New Local Innovation Exchange – I came back to my council with fresh insights, practical ideas for implementation and a brand new network of people in exactly the same boat as me”
Joanna Ruffle, Director of Transformation, Southend Council
Innovation Exchanges give participants from our member councils a space to step away from day-to-day activities and engage with peers from across the country. Each session addresses a big challenge or opportunity facing councils and their communities. Sessions are peer-led and practically-focused, so participants come away with insights, ideas and learning to share with their teams.
Meet our event partner
At Power to Change, our mission is to strengthen community businesses to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges at a local level, including the three biggest challenges of our time: climate change, digital transformation and social inequalities.
In the next five years, using strategic funding, trusted partnerships, rigorous research, policy insight, and a strong network of remarkable community businesses who are changing the world one day at a time, Power to Change will be a catalyst for the whole sector, creating the ideas, evidence, and exemplars that can make a case for others to back community business. Ultimately, we will amplify the efforts of community businesses and put them at the heart of a fair recovery.
We apply four values to everything we do:
- We are open: we will seek partners and allies beyond the community business sector to better help the community business model go mainstream, and will be open about our learnings as we test and discover new approaches to community-led resilient places.
- We are collaborative: we will continue to work with existing partners and new ones, drawing on each other’s skills to achieve what we couldn’t do alone
- We are informed: we will continue to work closely with community businesses and be informed by their lived experience and needs. We will approach new challenges with fresh eyes and take an evidence-led approach before rolling out solutions.
- We are bold: our plans are ambitious, and we will continue to enter markets where we see community businesses could thrive, and boldly speak to decision makers alongside community businesses.
Power to Change was set up in 2015 with a £150m endowment from The National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) and was due to close in 2022. Responding to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we realised that community businesses needed us more than ever. We received a further £20m from NLCF which enabled us to set out a new five-year strategy to continue supporting the sector.
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