Category: Member

Tackling empty homes in the UK is a critical step toward addressing the housing crisis and revitalizing communities.

27th February, 2025

Community engagement • Housing • Regeneration

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored explores explores building community cohesion to help communities and places thrive.

28th January, 2025

Community Cohesion • Community engagement

Neighbourhood ways of working are being considered by many councils as a way to bring them closer to their communities.

4th December, 2024

Community engagement • Neighbourhood

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored explores explores different approaches of democratic working that local authorities have used and see the impact it has had on their relationships with their communities

28th November, 2024

Community engagement • Democratic engagement

Using outcomes-focused relational working to reduce demand on statutory services can be difficult, but it has the potential to help local authorities effectively deliver preventative interventions.

5th November, 2024

Childrens' Services • Health and social care • Prevention • Public Services

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored explores long term investment in prevention and working in different ways in partnership across local systems of public services and voluntary sector organisations

25th October, 2024

Community engagement • Prevention

Working towards a fairer share of wealth across a locality helps bind communities together and gives the impetus to help drive forward the local economy.

15th October, 2024

Community engagement • Community-led • wealth building

Creating a strategy that is shaped by frontline services as well as those accessing them is vital for local authorities.

17th September, 2024

Community engagement • Equality • Public Services

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored explores community-powered methods to put residents at the heart of budgeting decisions and how to shift to more open dialogue about what stretched finances mean for services.

13th September, 2024

Budgeting • Community engagement • Local government • Strategy and leadership

Real-time data is a powerful tool for councils. Throughout the life cycle of a project, data can show what works and what doesn’t, leading to better decision making and improved outcomes.

10th July, 2024

Community engagement • Community Power

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored explores the importance of collaboration with communities in planning and development

25th June, 2024

Community engagement • Planning • Regeneration

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored takes a look what a successful social economy could look like and what would be needed to help it thrive.

4th April, 2024

Community business • Community Power • Economy and business • Finance • Local government

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored looks at how corporate teams can practically build a strong focus on communities into day-to-day operations.

4th April, 2024

Community Power • Culture • Local government • Strategy and leadership

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored looks at the kind of leadership skills needed in councils today.

4th April, 2024

Culture • Leadership • Local government • Skills • Strategy and leadership

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored takes a look at how councils can develop their focus on community wellbeing.

4th April, 2024

Community engagement • Community Power • Local government • Measurement and Evaluation • Public Services • Wellbeing

This member-exclusive Innovation Explored takes a look at the opportunities emerging from design thinking for local government, and how design-led systems change can improve outcomes locally.

4th March, 2024

Local government • Public Services • Strategy and leadership

28th February, 2024

Community engagement • Community Power

We put Des Keighan in our ‘How We Did It’ hot seat to hear how Swansea Bay University Health Board has become low carbon by retrofitting buildings and turning unused land into a solar farm which powers the local...

22nd February, 2024

Climate change • Community Power • Finance

Helen Chicot from Rochdale Council introduces a three-year project which has used Good Help principles to tackle the council’s most pressing challenges, transforming the way the way it works and its relationships with residents.

23rd November, 2023

Community engagement

Lorinda Freint from Richmond and Wandsworth Councils and Bex Trevalyan from Platform Places introduce Local Property Partnerships and explain how it’s helping tackle high street decline in Wandsworth Town.

17th October, 2023

Community engagement • Community Power • Local government

Xia Lin from Toynbee Hall introduces a research method designed to embed resident participation in local change-making and explains how co-design principles can be used to level the power playing field.

6th September, 2023

Community engagement • Community Power • Local government • Participation and co-production

Councils are constantly looking for new ways to engage their residents, from citizens’ assemblies to listening sofas. Critical to doing this well is to understand and to tell the story of the relationship between citizen and state. What should...

15th June, 2023

Community engagement

Shuff Tariq and Sarah Cooke explain how Manchester delivered one of the most successful homelessness projects in the UK.

5th April, 2023

Community engagement • Homelessness • Public Services

16th March, 2023

Community engagement • Culture

8th March, 2023

Community engagement

7th March, 2023

Community engagement

22nd February, 2023

Community engagement

In this instalment of our ‘How We Did It’ event series, Ben Hughes from Essex County Council shares his experience of setting up the Essex Recovery Foundation which is not only person-led, but community-powered, with former service-users integral to...

8th February, 2023

Community engagement

Places need new types of leaders, ones who increasingly collaborate with staff and communities to tackle today’s biggest challenges. This type of leadership is about starting to shift power to put others in the driving seat.

16th January, 2023

Strategy and leadership

How can you properly measure something when you are working in a system that frequently asks the wrong questions, focuses on the wrong measure, and can obsess over costs and ignore true value?

16th January, 2023

Impact

Making integration happen is by no means easy. Ambitions are often weighed down by complex restructuring, governance arrangements, and technical challenges around issues such as sharing data.

17th November, 2022

Partnerships

We live in unprecedented times, where we are facing increasing emergencies in our communities. From Covid-19 to the cost-of-living crisis; the answer to solving these issues sits with our residents.

14th November, 2022

Community engagement

Practice needs to shift in the council itself, in the local system and in working with communities to develop a community-focused approach to addressing health inequalities.

18th October, 2022

Health and social care

Risk – and aversion to it – is often thought to be the reason why a given innovation will fail to emerge in the public sector. Councils are strongly incentivised to take risks seriously and to avoid them when possible,...

3rd October, 2022

Local government finance

Local economic change looms for many communities. High streets are transforming as consumer habits shift, working patterns are altering in the wake of the pandemic, and new kinds of local economic collaboration are emerging.

3rd October, 2022

Community Power • Economy and business • Finance

Ideas and reflections on the challenges of: Developing a simple narrative that is owned by partners and communities, not just the council, and reflects the diversity of voices and experiences in the place; Making the narrative meaningful in practice and...

19th May, 2022

Community engagement • Community Power • Community Voices • Narrative building • Place building • Strategy and leadership

Ideas and reflections on embedding a more autonomous and permissive working culture; building greater resilience within the workforce; and creating a culture of co-production with local partners and communities.

2nd March, 2022

Commissioning and Procurement • Community Power • Culture • Participation and co-production • Partnerships

Ideas and reflections centred around three main challenges: Engaging the whole community on climate change. Telling an external story connecting local and global environmental issues. Ensuring climate change is a priority across the council.

8th November, 2021

Climate change • Community engagement • Community Power • Members • Mobilisation • Strategy and leadership

Ideas and reflections centred around three main challenges: building trust with communities; creating an organisational culture that values and enables community deliberation; and ensuring that councils are engaging with and hearing from all their communities.

1st September, 2021

Community engagement • Community Power • Culture • Democracy

Councils share their lessons learned from partnerships with Europe, Miami-Dade County in Florida, and with a charity in Sierra Leone.

22nd July, 2021

Partnerships • Strategy and leadership

Six key factors to consider when setting up a commission that will help you maximise impact.

22nd June, 2021

Commissioning and Procurement • Democracy • Devolution and reorganisation • Political Economy • Strategy and leadership

Balancing short-term and long-term political and financial pressures with the imperative to respond meaningfully to the climate emergency.

25th May, 2021

Budgeting • Climate change • Community engagement • Community Power • Culture • Finance • Members • Mobilisation • Strategy and leadership

Pivoting from the short-term emergency response to Covid-19 towards long-term organic community development.

24th February, 2021

Community Power • Culture • Democracy • Members • Strategy and leadership

How to build relationships with Whitehall and present persuasive evidence to civil servants.

22nd February, 2021

Central government • Community Power • Local government • Members • Partnerships

Avoiding a drift back to old norms and ways of working, addressing exclusion and preserving accountability.

15th February, 2021

Community Power • Culture • Local government • Local government reform • Members • Strategy and leadership

New Local partnered with Social Finance for an innovation exchange on establishing a new working relationship with partners.

20th January, 2021

Community engagement • Community Power • Culture • Members • Partnerships

Creating partnerships to maximise impact on jobs, and how to match skills to opportunities.

8th December, 2020

Community Power • Economy and business • Education and skills • Employment • Members • Partnerships • Skills

How to create a sense of shared purpose and navigate each partner's different objectives and cultures.

9th November, 2020

Community Power • Culture • Members • Narrative building • Partnerships • Place building

How to build a shared agenda and tackle big decisions with elected members.

22nd September, 2020

Community Power • Digital • Members • Strategy and leadership

Experiences of engaging communities - both successes and initiatives that didn't work as well as hoped.

15th June, 2020

Community engagement • Community Power • Culture • Democracy • Members