Mapping the benefits of community power

Grace Pollard, Senior Policy Researcher at New Local, analyses the six core benefits of community power and how, when taken together, they collectively chart a different way for people, communities and public services to collaborate

Community power is an idea whose time has come. From the recent paper from backbench Conservative MPs calling on the government to ‘trust the people’, to this year’s Cooperative Party conference which took community power as its main theme, to a new national campaign, led by local leaders demanding power to make change happen.

So what is it? At its heart community power is based on the principle that communities have a wealth of knowledge and assets within themselves. If these are understood and nurtured by practitioners and policymakers, they have the potential to create more resilient  places and stronger, preventative, public services

What does community power look like?
Community power is not just a theory. It already exists in neighbourhoods, in local networks, and in voluntary and community organisations where people come together to overcome challenges and support each other. It is also rapidly influencing practice in the public sector and local government.

In our research, New Local has identified three clusters of approaches which hand more power and resources to communities:

Community decision-making: Using deliberative and participatory tools to involve citizens more meaningfully in local decision-making.

Collaboration with communities: Public services shifting from hierarchical and siloed ways of working, to more collaborative approaches which deeply involve communities as equal partners with essential insights.

Building community capacity and assets: Equipping communities with the resources and skills they need to mobilise and genuinely participate in local action.

The six core benefits of community power
Numerous small-scale, innovative local practices shine brightly alone. But taken together, they collectively chart a different way for people, communities and public services to collaborate.

Our recent research took a comprehensive view of  what community power initiatives look like in practice and what impact they have had – drawing on examples from across the UK. From this, we pulled out six ways in which community power has real, tangible impact for people, communities and public services:

1. Community power can improve individual health and wellbeing. From well-established peer-support groups, to innovative community-led approaches, practitioners are recognising that people need to be active participants in all efforts to improve their health and wellbeing. They are also seeing the benefits this participation can bring for people.

2. Community power can strengthen community wellbeing and resilience. Involving people in decision-making, alongside supporting them with resources and wider social infrastructure, can enable community action to improve wellbeing and resilience locally.

3. Community power can enhance democratic participation and boost trust. Deliberative and participatory methods can be used to navigate complex socio-economic challenges and to strengthen legitimacy of decision-making. It is at the local level that this dialogue and engagement can be most meaningfully realised.

4. Community power can build community cohesion. The common understanding and social ties that are necessary for cohesion cannot be imposed in the abstract from the national level. Community-anchored approaches demonstrate that cohesion is most sustainably built from the ground up.

5. Community power can embed prevention and early intervention in public services. Where some parts of the public sector are pioneering new approaches that draw on the capabilities and capacities of communities, they demonstrate a route to more sustainable and prevention-focused public services.

6. Community power can generate financial savings. There is growing evidence that investing in community power approaches can generate greater impact for existing spend and save money in the longer-term.

Escaping the evidence paradox
There are plenty of examples of community power making a difference. But when it comes to proving value in evidence-based policy-making, community power is stuck in an ‘evidence paradox’. Community power practice, approaches and initiatives are required to demonstrate their own worth according to measures that are not set up to recognise their value. The value of community power is best captured qualitatively, yet the metrics are quantitative.

Community power approaches, by their very nature, are pluralistic, often small-scale and rooted in local context, but policymakers seek uniform and scalable approaches. Community power focuses on long-term impact, but short-term financial and political priorities drive the system.

This evidence paradox holds back community power from influencing wider system change. As things currently stand, although the evidence of their impact is palpable, it is not in the form required to prove a case for change according to the logic of the current system.

Community power approaches often remain on the margins of a wider system dominated by large-scale service operations either run by the state or outsourced to the private sector, both ultimately accountable to Whitehall rather than people locally.

We argue that the ‘state-market hybrid paradigm’ holds back the potential of community power by setting the terms for what constitutes ‘success’. This notion of ‘success’ is characterised by approaches that can demonstrate short-term impact in a specific service area and are shown to be uniform and in turn scalable.

Until there is a wider shift towards a community paradigm, the impact of community power will always be limited and ad hoc, rather than mainstreamed, where its full potential can be realised.

How to become community powered
So can we move towards community powered public services? We’ve identified four shifts , and four recommendations for policymakers to make it happen.

Shift one: Uniform to Pluralist Practice
Community power approaches are by their nature rooted in people, place and circumstance, meaning a model cannot just be taken from one area and rolled out in another.

Recommendation One: Practitioners should collaborate to share learning and build a stronger evidence-led case for the impact of community power approaches.

The purpose of this collaboration should be to strengthen evaluation approaches; share learning and identify common principles; and develop shared measures of value. This should help build closer dialogue between policy and practice and strengthen the wider case for change.

Shift Two: Merics to Ethos
The potential of community power will not be realised by creating a new set of public management style targets, but rather through a system in which communities, professionals and practices coalesce around shared purpose or ethos.

Recommendation Two: There needs to be an ambitious approach to devolved, place-based budgets across local public services, as a core prerequisite for transferring more power to communities.

Taking such a place-based approach to financing public services would introduce a new logic into the system, supporting the emergence of a new community focused ethos across public institutions.

Shift Three: Outputs to Outcomes
For national government, a greater focus on outcomes, particularly those that are meaningful to people’s lived experience, would create a permissive environment for community power practice.

Recommendation Three: The Treasury should adopt a well-being approach to budgeting.

This would catalyse action and redistribute power throughout the system. In turn, supporting the breakdown of unhelpful silos, a significant shift in focus towards prevention, and genuine collaboration with communities.

Shift Four: State-market to Community
To act on the wealth of evidence revealing the benefits of community power, a major shift in policy is required at national level. At the heart of this shift would be a landmark piece of legislation, a Community Power Act.

Recommendation Four: Parliament should pass a Community Power Act.

The Act would have four goals: to enshrine community rights; to enable community-focused devolution; to establish a Community Wealth Fund; to provide a permissive legislative and regulatory framework for community power.

Shifting to a community paradigm
We sit now at a critical crossroads. Community power is already supporting people, communities and public services to collaborate and improve outcomes. There is a real opportunity to build on this, and move towards a more  enabling and prevention-focused model of public services.

The case has been building for a long time, but our collective yearning to recover from a brutal pandemic better and stronger than we were before creates a new imperative to be bold. The evidence supports it. Let’s make it happen.