Entrusting Community Leadership in Manchester

By Stacy Partridge, Kim Liall and Hazel Musgrove | 17 November 2022 | TAGS: Local Pilot, Manchester

A common core principle underpinning work across Manchester, and other GM localities, has been a focus on going beyond community involvement or engagement, to entrusting community leadership.

We want to involve local people, despite the challenges this can present, on a regular basis.

Our working assumption is that if we facilitate community leadership by enabling communities to follow through on their ideas, working with local partners, we will build assets that are used by local people.

The assets will resonate with them, and they have some ownership of them.

In Manchester, the Heart and Soul project is a community-led research programme with the aim to find out what the key areas of concern were for residents in Woodhouse Park around health in their area.

Central to this project has been supporting a group of local residents, who are dedicated to this ambition, to become Community Researchers and then lead on local action to make in Woodhouse Park a healthier place.

There have been several phases to this work including residents learning how to be Community Researchers, collecting and analysing evidence, followed by creating their vision for a healthy Woodhouse Park.

Their vision was based on solutions to issues in the neighbourhood and from engagement with the wider community. The Community Researchers have been working to develop their vision into individual projects, to work together in partnership with local organisations and residents.

The Community Researchers’ exposure to partners and involvement in gathering intelligence themselves has helped to build and develop relationships in the local area.

They have also been able to build their confidence, resilience and future direction in their roles.

Community Researchers speaking in public and being the face of the Heart & Soul project have inspired other residents to see that their involvement can help make Woodhouse Park a healthier place to live.

GM Cross-Pilot Collective Sense-making:

The findings highlight further how change may happen: the role of the facilitator to consistently nurture, support, build capacity (where needed), provide opportunities and not to slip into ‘fixing’ mindsets.

They also illustrate the tendency for community leadership to be transitory, with individuals moving in and out of leadership roles.

This may, in fact, illustrate the wider societal and empowering benefits of the approach but must be factored into planning and resourcing.

We’ve learned through conversations with colleagues how there are different routes to community leadership, including both the utilisation of existing leadership in place as well as investment of time in building capabilities, capacity, and leadership abilities.

Both involve investment in relationship building and require officers to take a facilitative and supportive role.

For a one page summary please download the infographic.

Questions you could consider:

• How might we re-calibrate the success of community leadership development in ways that recognise personal as well as collective journeys?
• How might we mobilise those personal journeys to support capacity and community leader ‘pipeline’ development?

The full report here provides further detail, including first-hand testimony in the form of audio-visual recordings linked to passages in the report as well as self-contained and more detailed deep dive case studies.

Downloads

• Entrusting Community Leadership Infographic