Agenda item

Report of Gail Quinton, Deputy Chief Executive (People)

The Board considered a report of Gail Quinton, Deputy Chief Executive (People) which provided an update on progress against the Health and Wellbeing Strategy priority ‘Working Differently with our Communities’. Particular reference was made to the alignment of this activity with the work led through the Health and Care partnership.

The report indicated that work on the strategy was being led by the One Coventry Partnership. The engagement with communities and community organisations during the JSNA and Health and Wellbeing Strategy development had revealed an appetite for a change in approach to partnership working with communities. This meant working together, with communities, to improve people’s lives and the city for the better. Communities wanted to be part of the change and wanted to work with statutory partners, not to be “done to”, which meant changing traditional relationships. This was also in line with the Council’s One Coventry approach.

Reference was made to the priority objectives and the report outlined how there needed to be a shift in culture and behaviours amongst the statutory partners including:

·  Empowering and enabling community solutions by valuing the community leaders who had trust, networks, understanding and legitimacy; and getting behind existing partnerships;

·  Facilitating forums and networks to enable better collaboration and communication between public and third sector partners encouraging shared learning;

·  Taking forward work to change the way services were commissioned to better recognise social value and develop the role of anchor institutions; and

·  Providing practical support to strengthen the community sector, including by pooling resources to build capacity and connections and enable communities to maximise social action.

In order to develop the priority, engagement work had taken place with the voluntary and community sectors to understand the challenges facing the sector and to co-design an effective One Coventry engagement mechanism. The recent engagement with 70 representatives of community and voluntary sector organisations for the JSNA and 30 organisations during a visit with leaders of Arms Length Bodies has provided insights about the challenges faced which were detailed in the report and included: 

·  General support from third sector organisations to work together and with public sector organisations to make a bigger impact 

·  Achieving greater connectivity with shared aims was a big priority but was very hard to achieve as there was poor visibility of what was happening 

·  There were perceptions amongst smaller third sector organisations that the way the public sector commissions larger third sector organisations it created a two-tier system; larger organisations receive funding but expecting smaller grass roots organisations to deliver outcomes with no funding 

·  Public sector bodies were engaging in silos which caused duplication of effort and frustration

·  Resources to support effective networking were scarce 

·  Small organisations felt left out of conversations and influence and found it hard to engage through traditional mechanisms used by public sector; some probably weren’t part of any network 

·  There was wide-spread concern about how third sector organisations could achieve sustainable income streams and there was much interest in exploring more collaborative forms of commissioning.

Facilitated workshops were held through VAC with very small organisations to understand what engagement mechanisms would work well for them. On 3rd October, an event was held bringing existing networks and partnerships together with public sector engagement leads to co-design an effective One Coventry engagement mechanism – potentially a ‘network of networks’.

The report set out the approach to be developed for the ‘networks of networks.  A key set of themes had emerged through the engagement process as follows:

·  Coventry conversations – there were currently lots of individual conversations happening and there was a need to build on these and create city-wide consensus/ action. It was recognised that everyone needed to take responsibility for hosting/ organising events/ conversations

·  Place-based conversations – there was support for greater co-ordination at a placed-based level. Currently front line workers from a number of agencies were working in a place-based way but often in silo

·  Anchor institutions/ social value – the role of public sector organisations in maximising the social and economic value they brought to communities and to the voluntary sector was a key area for joint working.

The next steps involved the One Coventry Partnership identifying engagement leads from their respective organisations who could work together to help create a consistent public sector ‘offer’ and create an action plan setting out how the themes would be taken forward.

Members expressed support for the approach and further details were requested regarding a timeframe for implementation. There was an acknowledgement of the benefit of having a pool of information to be shared with others.

RESOLVED that the content of the report be noted and approval be given for a report on the development of anchor institutions in Coventry be considered at a future meeting of the Committee.