The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) has published the findings from its groundbreaking research in conjunction with the Resourceful Communities Partnership, on collaboration to improve community wellbeing.
It is hoped the reports, and a practical ‘Framework for Action’ will support and improve vital collaboration between public services and community organisations in Wales.
WCPP Senior Research Fellow, Dr Hannah Durrant, explains the background to this project, its key findings and the features of the Framework for Action.
THE BACKGROUND
During the pandemic there was an upsurge in community-powered action to support wellbeing. This often started with the delivery of food or prescriptions for those shielding but became about forging and maintaining social connection.
Communities took charge of ensuring the wellbeing of people in places. However, there was a real understanding that this upsurge in community action was made possible because of the relationships that were developed between public services and community organisations, and a changed way of working that, at its best, rested on mutually agreed goals and a shared respect for the different strengths and resources that each bring.
As we came out of the pandemic a group of public and community sector organisations with an interest in resourceful communities in Wales wanted to work with WCPP to learn from the best of these multisector partnerships. Together, we wanted to understand what effective collaboration looks like, but also to learn what underpins them. What are the things that effective collaborations do well that make them work and how could you make collaboration in your places work better, based on what we learn about the actions people take in other places.
WHAT DID WE DO?
We set out to find out more from research and practice about what makes collaborations work well.
The KEY FINDINGS of this research were the ACTIONS you should take to develop the features of good collaboration. We all know you need things like trust, strong and shared leadership and good place-based assets. But these things don’t just happen or appear in a vacuum, they need to be actively developed and maintained. What do people do to enable trust to be a feature of their collaboration? What do people in good collaborations do to develop, share and use assets well? We set out to find out what people did to develop these features.
We found that good community collaborations take action in three key areas:
- They do things that support the development of shared purpose, aims and goals
- They do things that enable them to coordinate across services, share responsibility across different partners, and run the collaboration in an effective way
- They do things to fund joint work through multiple mixed financial mechanisms that support rather than hamper collaboration.
We developed a FRAMEWORK FOR ACTION that provides some options for actions in each of these areas that your collaboration could try, each with an indication of the resources that may be required for that action, the timeframes to think about and the collaboration maturity needed for these actions to work best.
THE WELSH WAY
Wales benefits from having cross-sectoral forums, such as the Resourceful Communities Partnership (RCP) which is jointly chaired by Building Communities Trust and Pembrokeshire County Council. With over 150 members from across local government, the public, third and community sectors, academia and national policymaking bodies, the RCP is uniquely able to promote and share learning on good practice in collaborative community-based delivery of public services, playing a key role in bridging policy and practice.
Chris Johnes, Chief Executive of the Building Communities Trust said: “The RCP has done a huge amount to build mutual understanding and a sense of what is possible among its many participants – and having its work underpinned by quality research makes it stronger still.”
RCP and WCPP’s work together has been codesigned from the outset, beginning with the establishment of the shared goals and values that are essential for success. A key aim of our collaborative approach was to improve the relevance of research to practice contexts, and this approach allowed for the pooling of knowledge and expertise that really focussed the research on what practitioners in Wales would find most useful.
Rhian Bennett, Senior Commissioning Manager, Pembrokeshire County Council added: “The very nature of this research from WCPP embraces the spirit of collaboration and cross-sectoral partnerships that are fundamental to the RCP and its members. Through its design, implementation and dissemination, WCPP has taken a co-productive approach to working alongside colleagues in public and community sector organisations to develop research that not only adds to existing the knowledge base around multi-sector collaboration, but which offers practical, evidence-base findings that can be implemented by the different stakeholders to influence change and improve wellbeing outcomes for communities across Wales.”