Purpose, Trust and Connection

by Wendy Lansdown, Place Coordinator | on Twitter @wendylansdown

Care Together Workshop

A quiet January has  created some pondering time, a belated opportunity for reflection on the head-spinningly wonderful experience that was the Buurtzorg Caring Places: Building Healthy Communities Conference …. refreshing, scary, and nourishing in equal measure. 

It was my first in person conference since the equally mind-bending Stronger Things conference just before the first Lockdown.  I’m a bit of an introvert and with this emergence from hibernation, I found myself seeking out quiet corners, even the loo at one point, to find some headspace…room to process the rich, bamboozling array of ideas, conversations and mental fireworks, and just the experience of being amongst so many people again… a tingling shock to the system.  In those snatched moments I saw the core of our Neighbourhood Cares work more vividly than I have before.  Also, what remains true of the work of our Think Communities team today; Purpose, Trust and Connection.  The day was full of powerful stories, people who have lived and breathed Buurtzorg talking about its essence.  The founder Jos de Blok summed up its core in the plenary, encouraging us to mobilise our networks to create health by ‘focussing on Human Driven Systems and Community Centred thinking’.

This got me thinking about our Think Communities team.  We came into being less than a year ago, mini teams of three in each district.  Our purpose echoes that of Neighbourhood Cares; to support people to be happy, healthy and independent in their community, perhaps with a greater emphasis on interdependence. 

We are expanding the focus from adults with care and support needs onto the wider community in a holistic Asset Based Community Approach.  The aims and principles continue to chime with those of Neighbourhood Cares – we’re all about building trust, led by people and communities we work with, walking alongside each other. 

Caline, Chris and I are the East Cambridgeshire team.  As for so many in the public sector, the year hasn’t gone as we planned, the pandemic brought changing priorities and redeployment.  Yet, arriving in the new year we found ourselves with hope in our hearts, realising that despite all the unexpected twists and turns we have already started to feel more connected with our communities, and feel excited for the year ahead.

Chris became involved in a lovely piece of work before Christmas.  He’s got a skill for helping enable community magic without taking the limelight.  Through a walkabout in the small village of Westley Waterless, he discovered a real enthusiasm amongst local people to bring their dusty village hall back to life.  The amazing individuals he met already had ideas and energy, they asked Chris and other community partners if jointly they could help bring people together.  So Chris booked our Community Engagement Vehicle (aka repurposed Library Van) and joined the community for a few hours of fun and plan-hatching.   The event was buzzing, almost half the village turned up!  And a few weeks later the village hall has six new committee members, a new chair and the beginnings of a plan for the future.

Caline is one of those people who brings out the sparkle in others.  Through some early work we have done on the Care Togehter initiative (more about that later) we met a woman who is one of life’s natural community connectors, who was saying how sad she is that the communal room of their housing scheme has been unused since the pandemic began.   She is fizzing with ideas and has asked for a hand to help make them happen, Caline popped by and they had an initial conversation with their helpful housing warden and have plans to use all of the local neighbourhood connections to bring the community’s ideas to life.

Along with these community-led local initiatives, we’ve been getting to know people across the East Cambs ecosystem.  Like Neighbourhood Cares, our work is all about relationships.  Boy have we landed on our feet in East Cambs!

We feel so lucky to be in a place where finding shared purpose and values has come so naturally.  The two GP Clinical Leads of the Primary Care Networks which cover the majority of our district both believe health creation is at the heart of their work.  In the District council our colleagues embrace partnership working and across the community and voluntary sector we have found allies keen to collaborate, some weary from having been trying to do so for years, still welcoming us as we finally catch up with their thinking.

So far our work has focused on building a community framework for collaboration.  We’re really fortunate that across the system there are people who act as anchors – in both a pioneering and ethical way.  Across Primary Care Networks, communities, councils, education and Community Safety Partnership, there are people who share values and purpose and believe in collaboration.  People who have been in roles long term, and importantly, don’t plan on disappearing any time soon.  I really value weekly catch ups with anchor colleagues from district council and health.  It’s a friendly relationship, where we share what matters and work out our next steps.  We know the importance of good communication and together we frame conversations that can work across our communities.

This stability and shared view has been fertile ground on which to build collaboration.  The Integrated Neighbourhoods and Community Safety Partnership (CSP) have led the way, developing a broad, active and diverse membership and a momentum for change.  The few members who sit on both boards are helping fuel inspiration and cooperation.  

This is all part of a wider community tapestry, which we’ve enjoyed helping to weave.  The Parish and Community Forum which was mentioned in a previous blog ( Community is for Life, not just for Covid ) is going from strength to strength.  At the most recent meeting we discussed the growing concern around Food Poverty, we found a shared passion for this from across our communities and an enthusiasm to work together.  As a result, an online gathering has taken place and a plan is forming for a District wide Food Poverty network

The Mental Health initiative we mentioned here, also arose from the Parish and Community Forum.  It has played a role in garnering interest from a wide range of partners – charities, schools, community leaders, commissioners and health workers – people keen to collaborate to support positive mental health. When we first got together, we shared sad stories of desperation, long waits and isolation and felt a sense of futility.  However, through continuing to meet, we’ve found a sense of agency, a space where we can be positive.  We will never replace clinicians and therapists, but we believe the community can play a useful role in supporting people to stay well, or even helping in a fitting way whilst people are waiting for services.  We’re shaping a plan for a community based peer support initiative, focusing on young people.  There’s an appetite for this in one of our market towns.  With the wonderful mix of individuals and organisations involved, we believe this could be the start of something locally grown, and we have the right supportive expertise in place to build in the necessary safeguards whilst keeping the community at its heart.

All of these collaborations involve our Social Prescribers; an inspiring, talented team who have made such a phenomenal difference in such a short time, despite the pandemic turning their roles upside-down.   They connect, encourage and enthuse their way to some brilliant outcomes and go above and beyond to banish isolation, help people find purpose and meaning, a reason to want to live a long and healthy life.  The Social Prescribers are key to our Virtual Wellbeing Team. Meeting once a month, along with Community Navigators, Community and Housing colleagues, Health, Voluntary services our new Community Enterprise Catalyst, to have a friendly conversation about our shared interest in the preventative world, helping people to thrive.

When we meet this week we’ll have Care Together: Happy at Home on our agenda. Shortened locally to Happy at Home this is a new collaborative initiative in which our district will be early adopters of an Asset Based Area approach which will then grow across the county (great recent publication from Think Local Act Personal here). The photo above is from one of our early workshops. 

I’m excited to be leading a workstream within Happy at Home.  This blog is already too long, I’ll be back with detail as we get underway.  We are going to adopt an experimental approach, inspired by the Human Learning Systems work, and specifically by insights from the Practical insights into Putting People First event.  

Our instinct is to begin by inviting partners across the ecosystem to join us in using Appreciative Enquiry to listen and understand from residents how they see and value their community.  And together to use this learning to help people be happy at home for as long as possible.  

We believe that part of the warp and weft of this community tapestry will be inspired by Compassionate Frome creating a Community Maker role whereby we invite local residents who are natural community connectors to utilise the new How Are You East Cambs? website and Elemental software to help the people they see in the natural course of their lives to connect to the amazing wealth of community activity on our doorsteps.  Less a formal volunteering role, more a Dementia Friends style way to support brilliant people who are already making amazing connections at the heart of our communities.

It’s great to arrive in the new year with hope and excitement for what lies ahead.  Also to continue to feel the reverberations of Neighbourhood Cares running through our work today.  At the Caring Places event (which can be watched here) the importance of employing the right staff with the right value set was emphasised.  My boss has done an amazing job of this – creating a diverse countywide team with an eclectic skills mix and a deeply held belief in community power. 

Caring Places was also all about trust.  In a similar way to Neighbourhood Cares, Think Communities is building trust into our team framework, empowered by a Director who encourages us to proceed until apprehended, so long as we do no harm and leave the law and budget intact.  How liberating is that?  I wondered initially if this bravery was teetering on rashness. But no, it’s well judged. This pioneering, motivated team with shared values and brilliant partners across the county can move mountains and we keep each other on course through our shared purpose, trust and connection.

I’ve been a happy passenger on the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) bus now for about a decade.  For most of those years ABCD has felt like a nice thing that the Community Development team do, providing stories that make you feel warm inside. In itself this is worthwhile, real outcomes for real people like Anwar and sometimes going a step further by partnering with one or two other organisations as we had the pleasure of with Soham Library in Neighbourhood Cares.  Good and worthwhile, but still relatively small.

Writing this blog I’m catching a glimpse of what might be.  The partnerships forming in East Cambs are creating new possibilities.  What ABCD can achieve when it’s embraced and woven into the heart of the place – smoothing the road and fueling the tank for acceleration.   I’m looking forward to Stronger Things 2022 – Community Power: The Movement Grows to help light the road ahead. We are part of this movement.

It may be a tiny dot in the distance, but I can just begin to see how Purpose, Trust and Connection shared at an individual, community, organisational and eco-system level can make meteoric change.  The kind that have been seen in the Wigan Deal and Compassionate Frome. Where you stop trying to discern how a tiny piece of ABCD practice causes change – almost impossible to gauge in a world of complexity.  Instead you’re seeing at scale how a whole place embraces a way of working and being. Then – over a number of years – the crunchy undeniable impact of whole system change becomes clear.  A change so big and systemic that you can get past the limits of a Theory of Change (which work well for linear change created by individual projects, less well in complexity) and into the world where together we can demonstrate system wide change.  

In Wigan the proportion of physically active adults increased from 48 percent in 2012 to 63.4% in 2017. Over a six year period early deaths from Cardio Vascular Disease reduced by 29% for males and 25% for females.  And in Frome this happened:

published on Shift Design website

In both cases the changes have been made over the course of a decade.  It’s early days for us, exciting ones.  The sense of joint endeavour is palpable.  The fact that I’ve run out of synonyms and used the word ‘collaborative’ way too many times is indicative of how much this is at the heart of our work.  And the nature of that partnership is key.  A colleague from the district council reflecting on a groundswell of momentum we’ve all felt, commented ‘do you think it’s because we leave our egos at the door?’. Yes, absolutely, it feels like we’re all here together, using a shared compass to find a mutual path, and helping each other up rather than blaming each other if we stumble along the way.