Introducing our #CouncilCulture Collaborative Innovation project
Our latest collaborative innovation project asks:
How might we shift #CouncilCulture so that local governments work with citizens to make places better?
Over the last ten years, we’ve met plenty of councils and council officers who want to shift their relationships with citizens, and worked extensively with Kirklees Council on its “Shaped by People” active citizenship initiative. But the gravitational pull of “business-as-usual” is strong. Councils need to make intentional and authentic shifts in their working cultures if they are to build the confidence, commitment and capacity to involve local people as citizens shaping their places, and not just consumers of council services. But how can this actually be done?
We’ve teamed up with council officers from Waltham Forest, South Gloucestershire and Westmorland and Furness to explore this question. Representing urban, suburban and rural areas and spread across different regions, the three councils have in common a desire to involve local people more in making the places where they live better. Each is also in a period of transition, whether due to a new CEO, a change in administration, or — in Westmorland & Furness’s case — the creation of an entirely new local authority. Three to four people from each council are taking part, spanning a range of roles from operations, housing, strategy and procurement.
Over the course of four workshops, we will be devising and trialling new ideas for how local councils can take practical steps to shift their working cultures, step-by-step and team-by-team, to promote Citizen thinking and practice. As in all of our collaborative innovation projects, the teams will also share their experiences and “co-mentor” each other as the process unfolds.
Kicking off the project
In November 2023, we met in the Grand Union gallery space in Birmingham to spend a day getting to know each other and sharing our hopes and expectations for the project, as well as starting to work on the “narrative” element of our “Narratives, Rituals and Totems” culture change model (more on the model here, and on the initial findings from the “narrative” work in Part 2). Three themes emerged from our initial discussions.
#1. There are plenty of positive examples to build on
In the spirit of “appreciative inquiry”, we invited each attendee to share a favourite example of their council doing something “with” people and not “for” them. It quickly became clear that there is lots of good practice to learn from and build on.
For example, we heard about:
- How over 80 young residents in Waltham Forest came together to transform an unused area in the middle of a housing estate into “The Shade”, an award-winning, well-loved community space with a stage, BBQ, games, seating and planting. The “Making Places” programme saw the council work with Build Up, an organisation that runs practical construction projects for young people to design and build structures in their local communities.
- How a team at South Gloucestershire Council partnered with the local voluntary, community and social sector to ensure that people shielding during COVID received “more than a food pack”, by signposting them to more holistic support for issues such as loneliness and financial difficulties. The team also worked with the council’s in-house catering function to create more culturally appropriate food packs than what was being offered by central government, and tailor the service to the needs of different communities.
- How a group of mums living on a housing estate in Barrow came together to create “a place that’s ours”, in response to a lack of local community assets. The group figured out which type of events and services they wanted, and the council helped by facilitating and brokering access to space and funding. The group has since taken on land to set up a community garden and community fridge (plus a Facebook group for sharing recipes), as well as run events. The group is now working with the council to shape local adult education services.
Unsurprisingly, everyone agreed that the COVID era had opened up whole new ways of working with communities:
“During COVID, we were able to be more community-focused. We put the infrastructure in place and stepped back. We’ll walk alongside you, but we can’t do it for you. Getting out of the way was really powerful — we had so many new conversations.”
#2. The scale of the challenge can be intimidating
Despite all of the above, participants recognised that truly changing behaviours across a whole council feels like a tall order. There was a fear that the project could become lost in the maelstrom of changes and challenges that councils currently face.
As such, we all recognised the need to strike the right balance between experimenting in a bottom-up, grassroots way, and ensuring that whatever we explore has the potential to gain traction across the organisation. Cultures rarely transform overnight, but the last thing we want is for this project to be a “quirky” nice-to-have. Finding viable ways for culture change to replicate and scale across teams and councils is a vital part of the project.
More widely, participants also recognised that “it’s a brave decision to truly hand over power to citizens”, given the statutory, regulatory and reputational risks councils face — even when it comes to things as “simple” as verge maintenance! And conversely, citizens and community groups themselves may be intimidated by the idea of taking on more power and responsibility for shaping their places, particularly where they rely on a small, active core group of volunteers.
It was also recognised that engagement levels vary: some residents are proactive and want to roll up their sleeves and get things done, while some expect decision-making to be handled by others. And of course, having been treated like consumers of services by their councils, many residents are instinctively inclined to respond as such!
One way of approaching this dilemma is to think in terms of creating conditions for participation, rather than zero-sum power-sharing. Thinking about how we can make decisions and take action together, rather than framing the question in terms of “handing over” power, takes the pressure off both sides. Creating conditions for participation also means offering a range of different opportunities to suit different engagement preferences and levels of interest. To be clear, focusing on creating conditions doesn’t mean ignoring power, as it’s still important to consider power dynamics and address historical and systemic barriers to participation in order to ensure that the conditions are inclusive.
#3. Community power is political
An important part of our ultimate goal is to widen and enrich opportunities for citizens to participate in shaping their places for the better, including local services, amenities and community assets. There is always a risk, however, this will step on the toes of those community groups and organisations that have already managed to secure access and influence to (and in some cases, funding from) local councillors and council officers.
Faced with diverse, multi-layered and overlapping local communities, it’s natural for council teams to form trusted relationships with prominent community leaders and organisations with solid track records, and go to these trusted voices when seeking to “engage the community”. It’s also a generally accepted practice for councils to create formal structures such as panels and committees in order to ensure community involvement in particular areas, issues or services.
The problem is that this concentrates power into the hands of a relatively small group of community leaders. These community leaders cannot be realistically expected to perfectly represent what local communities want — it’s unfair to ask this of them — and in a minority of cases, they can even be blockers to what communities really need. However, it must be recognised that giving more people opportunities to participate, while vitally important, can disrupt these valuable relationships.
For example, imagine a council decides to increase citizen involvement by introducing a participatory budgeting initiative. This could result in local people deciding to redirect funds away from a community organisation that had previously relied on its strong relationship with a particular grant-giver at the local council, causing resentment and dampening appetites for future collaboration.
We would certainly argue that this is not a justification for deciding not to widen participation and involve more people in local decision-making! But it does suggest that the culture change that we are aiming to achieve at councils must eventually gain “buy-in” not just from fellow council colleagues, but also from the many layers of local civil society.
Interested? Get involved!
Our collaborative innovation projects always aim to create valuable learnings and tools for the wider sector as well as the direct participants. We’ll be blogging and sharing updates throughout this project, as well as organising webinars and launch events. Subject to interest, we may also host further workshops to introduce emerging tools to a wider range of interested councils.
If you’d like to receive further updates on #CouncilCulture collaborative innovation project, including invitations to future webinars, workshops and launch events, you can register for email updates.
