Written by:
Sophia de Sousa
Working with the Open University, we recently carried out a series of conversations with a group of place-based partners representing different types of community and voluntary sector organisations in different parts of the UK, operating at varying scales and with different areas of focus or specialisms.
Each partner owns and manages one or more community buildings, and has a strong presence within their community, providing a range of activities and services and building capacity of local groups and community enterprises. They all have inspiring stories about how they have transformed their buildings into welcoming and accessible spaces, while tackling the challenges of creating economically, socially and environmentally sustainable community assets.
We worked with this group to identify some of the key challenges faced by asset based community-based organisations, with a particular focus on what would help them enhance the impact of their work. Our hope was to work together to shape a national infrastructure network to support knowledge exchange and skills sharing across communities, and we remain committed to championing and supporting this idea. Whilst the current funding landscape makes it difficult to set up and resource a dedicated project to do this right now, we do feel that there is value in sharing what we have learnt from our community partners, and indeed from the very many community-based organisations we have been privileged to work with across a number of projects and programmes.
Having worked as a national charity supporting community-led projects and organisations for over two decades, The Glass-House is acutely aware of the experience and expertise developed within communities. We have also witnessed and benefitted from the instinctive generosity that most community-based organisations demonstrate in sharing what they know. It is therefore useful to explore what community-based organisations see as both the challenges and genuine opportunities they see in connecting with others and sharing their learning:
Connecting with local people who feel disconnected & disenfranchised
Community organisations need to constantly find novel ways to invite local disenfranchised people in, help them feel welcome and part of a community, share experiences and cultures and work together as confident, active citizens. This often requires targeted outreach and building relationships and trust over time and does not always fit neatly into “fundable projects”.
Moving conversation to action
They need more time for conversation and networking to activate collaborations and grow new activities and services. Sometimes this time feels hard to find, resource or justify when they are busy with delivering various live programmes of work.
Creating space for experimentation
All of these groups embrace a culture of research and innovation, yet find it hard to resource experimental work. This is made harder by funders focusing on project funding, targets and deliverables, and creates little space or resource to simply experiment, reflect, learn and adapt, or indeed change direction.
Capturing & sharing learning
Our community partners felt they had learnt a lot through their work, and would like to better reflect, capture and share learning with other communities. Creating time and space to reflect and capture learning, and to develop accessible ways to package and share that learning, feels important but challenging. Too often, evaluation is prescribed by funders and focuses on gathering data and reporting project statistics, outputs and outcomes, rather than capturing and transferring knowledge, approaches and methods.
Despite being keen to share their learning with others, they also sometimes find it difficult to connect with the other communities and organisations they feel would most benefit from what they have learnt.
Taking time out to get inspired by and learn from others
By the same token, visiting and learning from other communities can be catalytic and inspiring, but most community-based organisations have very limited time or resources to do this. They appreciate the role that national or regional bodies and networks can play in this and think there is scope to do much more in terms of knowledge exchange.
Increased, and more equitable collaboration with other sectors
Nearly all of the community based organisations we have worked with collaborate in some way with other sectors. Most would like to do more to empower local people and groups through cross-sector initiatives locally and would welcome a more open, collaborative approach to equitable partnership working by public and private sector partners.
I would argue that none of the observations outlined above will be news to those who work within or with community anchor organisations. However, together these points make a compelling argument for investing in the still largely untapped potential for community anchor organisations to play an active role in action research and knowledge production and transfer.
Simply put, we could all learn a lot from just about any community-based organisation out there, and from the diverse communities they support. How can we better support and enable community-based organisations not just to deliver the ever more essential projects, activities and services to support our daily needs, but to also be active spaces for sharing their ever-evolving expertise and learning?
As part of our Incubating Civic Leadership research project, we revisited community based groups that we worked with in the Empowering Design Practices project, to capture and celebrate their own journeys and to provide some inspiration for anyone considering a community-led civic action project. This film shares reflections from ISRAAC Somali Community Association.