Strengthening communities through collaboration

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen collaboration across and within every sector to tackle the public health crisis and its wider societal impacts. Helen Goulden, Chief Executive of the Young Foundation, explains why a return to entrenched, siloed working would be detrimental to the well-being of people, places and communities.

The Understanding Communities collaboration aims to deepen our understanding of communities in the UK and how connections within and between communities can affect people’s well-being. Issues of trust and confidence and interactions with localities, structures, systems and institutions will also be key.

As Professor Ash Amin points out most effectively in this blog, many of the communities we are part of transcend geography and place. They intersect haphazardly and organically with faith, family, personal and professional networks that span town, region and national boundaries. And it is that complex mess of social interactions, nested within both our analogue and digital lives, that influence our well-being – impeding or enabling a life well lived. Professor Amin rightly asks: “How can the relationship between community and well-being be reimagined with place at its centre, but not reduced to it?”

Place-based interventions to support wealth and well-being have a long history. Back in 2001, the government launched its National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal with a vision that “within 10 to 20 years no-one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live”. From the Community Development Projects of the 1970s, through the creation of City Action Teams in the 1980s and the Single Regeneration Budget in the 1990s, there have been countless interventions over the last half century designed to address the needs of left-behind areas across the country. And despite all these interventions, representing billions of pounds, we are still wrestling with these challenges; now intensified by the impacts of the pandemic.

Therefore, any policy or research initiative attempting to work at a place-based, local level to strengthen communities in ways that increase life chances and well-being needs to take account of four key things:

How do we know what works?

Systematic reviews of place-based policies are rare, and whilst there are some reports which provide a chronology of place-based approaches, we still have close to zero shared understanding regarding the relative impact of those approaches, either in their individual localities or their collective impact across a nation.

As large-scale government funding flows once more across the country to tackle inequalities, it does so in blurry half-light, unable to draw evidence-based conclusions about which historic initiatives have favoured or failed the lives they were trying to affect.

The vast majority of the £170 billion of new funding currently flowing to support places across the UK is primarily capital for hard infrastructure, with only a tiny fraction of this dedicated to the social and community infrastructure that is now readily acknowledged to be of prime importance for improving people’s life chances, health and well-being. 

Are we innovating enough?

The proliferation of measures and indices for understanding community strength and well-being at a local and national level has been growing at some pace. One only has to look at the Community Strength Index, the Vibrant Economy Index, the Community Well-Being Index, the Community Needs Index, the Thriving Places Index, the London Prosperity Index and the Social Fabric Index (this list is not exhaustive) to see that there is a huge desire to measure the relative strength of place-based communities in ways that can transcend and complement well-honed measures like gross value added (GVA) and multiple deprivation.

What is in far shorter supply, are the innovative strategies, models and methods which evidentially help those experiencing the greatest vulnerability and disadvantage in the UK. In other words, we are heavy on diagnosis, and light on prescription. Yet, both measures and methods are needed if we are to better direct resource and funding flows towards the areas and issues that are mostly likely to shift the needle towards greater equality and well-being.

Whose reality counts?

What is lacking in most of the initiatives designed to strengthen communities, is the collective experiences of people and communities themselves. This is not a call to displace quantitative measures or population-level statistics, but we must acknowledge the absence of lived experience from our evidence base and find innovative ways to dynamically understand how people experience the implementation of strategies which influence their well-being. From deeply ethnographic local approaches to large scale sentiment analysis, the range of methods which seek to both understand and involve people in research and citizen science activities is growing and presents exciting opportunities for both research innovation and social change, if only we can exercise a little social imagination.

How can we design sustained systemic collaboration at a local level?

Pleas and calls for greater collaboration to tackle entrenched problems are also in huge supply. Across the public, health, academic and voluntary and community sectors you would be hard pressed to find anyone who was not in agreement with the need for more collaboration and working at a ‘system level’. And the pandemic has positively forced collaboration across and within every sector; creating new networks of communication and support, joining-up NHS, local government and emergent and existing community groups and voluntary services in ways that have responded highly effectively to a public health crisis. A crisis that will not be our last.

There is a danger that we over-ride these COVID collaboration experiences and fall back into entrenched, siloed working, and there is a real need to hold open the space for deliberate, longer-term research into strategies and models which exemplify sustained, systemic collaboration in places and communities. Initiatives like the Buffalo Equity Roundtable, represent profound, community involvement models to shift power and create tangible inroads into reducing inequality and driving a more inclusive economy and society.

This kind of working – which combines collective intelligence, collective sense-making and cross-sector action – thrives where there is low ego, mutual benefit, and a willingness to blur boundaries for the sake of working towards a shared goal. It requires conscious effort and all our 21st Century competencies to work. It also requires the confidence and trust to unravel and reweave new patterns of working and being together.

The Understanding Communities collaboration then, presents a much-needed opportunity to ‘bring the system into the room’ in rigorous and fearless ways. And if we can accept the paucity of our evidence base to date, build on the existing community measurement frameworks, legitimise the experiences of people, and always be asking who’s missing? from a place or community-based strategy or research project focused on communities, we will have come a long way.