Working with communities

The nature and type of partnership working with communities is wide-ranging: no single approach is appropriate for all. But the outcome is a “co-produced” solution that makes the most of local assets as well building trust between the people involved. Examples range from participatory budgeting to community garden initiatives.

The idea is that government and the community work together, enabling one another, with greater and greater citizen empowerment as a result. Central to co-production is the realisation that you as a council need the input and insight of the resident as much as they need you. There are skills which people in the community have, and these can be built upon. This moves your authority’s role away from delivery and towards enabling mutual relationships, which will support this approach.

To co-produce well, think through the places where you might be able to collaborate for each project or service. This might include budgeting, commissioning, design, delivery or even evaluation. Ideas such as citizen juries are examples of how co-production approaches can be applied to decision-making. There are challenges involved, of course. One of the joys of co-production is that there’s a degree of unpredictability. Co-production must also be something that’s part of a council’s ethos – not tucked away in a separate department.

To get to this point it’s important to be clear about the limits of co-production as well as the possibilities. Co-production isn’t always suitable, and – as with all types of engagement – it needs to happen within clear parameters. You can begin by creating pilot projects to test the water – but your target must be for whole services (and ultimately the whole authority) to be comfortable with co-production methods. That needs leadership and staff development.

You also need to ensure that co-production doesn’t give advantage to some groups and communities over others. This danger is pointed out by the Association of Public Service Excellence and the Trade Union Congress, who say that: “The skills and capacity to engage in co-production are not evenly distributed, creating disproportionate and often unfair disadvantage between communities.” This is an important thing to acknowledge: co-production, more than any of the other approaches described in this guide, runs the risk of generating the least engagement from the very people that need it most. Taking steps to “map” communities will help you understand capabilities and levels of confidence and competence among residents. This can feed into the approach you take to co-production, making sure that it’s inclusive. It can also help you to focus on building capacity. If a community lacks the IT skills to co-design a community website, for instance, then you need to focus on giving people these skills first.

This is undoubtedly hard work and there’s a lot to do, but it will be rewarding in the long term. It can also, once a virtuous circle is created, become a way of saving money. It will create social and organisational capital and create fit-for-purpose services that are more relevant and potentially more efficient.