From convener to facilitator: the realities of collaboration

Words by Elizabeth Lloyd, Economic Development Officer at London Borough of Camden.

This blog details part of what we’re doing within our Good Work programme. For an introduction to where this work came from, read our blog on taking a human centred design approach here.

In this time of ever-shrinking resources the need for collaboration across the public and voluntary and community sector is greater than ever. Camden has a great history of communities coming together to tackle problems and bring about real social change. One of the borough’s greatest strengths is the range of partners that work within it to support residents reach their aspirations and help them feel connected to their community.

Embodying this spirit, many residents in Camden are supported to find work by Camden’s talented voluntary and community partners. Whilst recent employment figures appear positive, we know that we need increasingly innovative solutions to tackle fundamental structural problems such as in-work poverty, the disability employment gap and labour market exclusion, and the voluntary and community sector have a key role to play in this.

From convener to facilitator

In recent years, we’ve taken a strategic convening role in the way we work with our employment support partners. We’ve seen our role as supporting residents to access the support our partners provide by facilitating sign-posting and referral routes, and convening a network made up of these partners.

Despite these best efforts, in our conversations with residents we’ve heard that it’s often still difficult to find the right support and that the variety of support available in the borough can often feel fragmented (read more about our human centred design approach here). We think this means that our role needs to evolve from convener to a facilitator of much deeper collaboration amongst our partner organisations so we can foster innovation, create a more coherent experience for our residents and enable partners to learn from each other in pursuit of providing the best quality support to our residents.

To achieve this, we’ve decided to dedicate more resource to our network of local partners in order to understand what being a facilitator really means and explore how we can support deeper collaboration. We realised quickly that this new approach needed to deliver reciprocal benefit for us, our partners and our residents. Our partners are, understandably, focused on the support they provide to residents on a daily basis, and collaboration with other organisations takes time. For our partners to come on this journey with us, they need to realise benefit from the time they invest.

From meeting to workshopping

Our first approach to fostering greater collaboration has been taking a more workshop approach to network meetings, where we act as facilitator rather than information provider. In bringing together different people representing different services, we’re bringing together different resources and skill sets.

In partnership with FutureGov, we’ve embedded a collaboration ‘culture’ which is centred on shared values. We’re sharing challenges as well as successes, including those specific to individual services, and supporting group decision making. As a result, we’ve established joint ownership of solutions that genuinely reflect the services that would use or deliver them, making the implementation of innovative ideas and new ways of working more likely to be successful.

For example, we’ve all agreed the ambition that there is ‘no wrong door’ into employment support in the borough, and that a resident will be supported to find the best support for them within the network by the first person they meet if they are not able to provide that support themselves. We’re working together to make this possible, by understanding what the different providers in our network do and building the relationships that make a great handover possible.

Collaboration projects

However, collaboration within a workshop setting can only be the start of the story and, to enable deeper collaboration, members of the network have identified collaboration projects that they want to work on together in smaller groups.

Three project groups are focused on designing a shared solution to an identified blocker in the current system of support, with each group determining how and when it works together and what success looks like. We’re facilitating these project groups, but the work they do is their own. The project groups are looking at:

- Sharing knowledge and experience amongst providers. This will initially focus on CVs — what does a good CV look like and how do we embed a shared understanding around this across providers.

- Designing and embedding shared principles that reflect good practice in employment support across the network.

- Developing a shared approach to referrals and supporting ‘warm’ handovers across the network.

Looking to the future

Collaboration isn’t easy, and we’re starting to learn about what does and doesn’t work by trying things out — we’ll adjust as we go based on what seems best in our context. For now though, a focus on facilitating conversations, driven and owned by our partners, feels like the right approach.

There are exciting things on the horizon for how we support people into good work in Camden, and whilst it hasn’t always been smooth sailing and there’s still a way to go, it’s great to see innovative solutions to problems and new ways of working being developed and owned by partners from across the borough. The challenges we face in realising good work for all are great, and we can’t tackle them alone — we feel hugely lucky to have such a dedicated group of partners on that journey with us.

Look out for subsequent blogs that will update on how these collaboration projects are progressing, and what we’re learning.