Anna Birney, CEO of the School of System Change, discusses why we need to resource learning and practice development for place-based change makers
Resourcing places can often seem like pouring water (“funding”) onto pasture. If you pour water on soil that is compacted and lacks any organic matter, the water may just run off or just sit there on the surface, if it is too porous and dry it will offer some benefit whilst a lot will just wash through. In both instances precious nutrients can be lost through erosion or leaching. However if the soil has a root system it supports the absorption and increases the capacity of water it can hold and its resilient and regenerative ability. But instead of building this root system, we compensate by adding synthetic fertilisers (controlling and trying to force change) rather than the more organic and sustainable approaches.
In many places, people, groups, organisations and movements are grappling with the complexity of the challenges they are facing, from poverty, climate change and the underlying widening chasm of division. Collective agency is needed, the power and resources to support the flourishing of a just, resilient and regenerative future — to grow the transformative alternatives.
“We live in a time of change, a time of enormous upheaval — and a time of unprecedented opportunity. A strong civil society is urgently needed to shape the future. The big role for civil society in the coming years is to generate a radical and creative shift — one that puts power in the hands of people and communities, preventing an ‘us and them’ future, connecting us better and humanising the way we do things” This is a quote from Civil Society Futures, a two year inquiry into the future of civil society in 2018, eight years later loads of experiments and the growth of place based work as emerged as a response to this need and yet more is still needed — one that speaks to the move towards place based and community work as the bounds of where the work needs to and is happening.
“Building that which does not yet fully exist is now part of our collective responsibility” Sophia Parker, Emerging Futures Director at JRF speaks to the need to fund and resource this work —whilst also noting that many of these organisations are “surviving on breadcrumbs”.
Lessons from the Pathfinders programme at Joseph Rowntree Foundation say we need a deliberate approach to ecosystem building. Local Motion (6 place-based initiatives resourced by five UK Funders) and BBC Children in Need with the launch of their communities for children approach have embedded learning and practice support for the backbone organisations running community partnerships and movements. Local Trust realised the importance of individual confidence, capacity and agency in the delivery of the Big Local programme, and created the Community Leadership Academy. All are reflecting the need of investing in learning as the key to change, for the “system leadership needed to nurture this ecosystem building… with the convening power to bring relevant actors for a systemic approach… as well as the decision-making power and access to resource to make such an initiative possible”.
My own experience of running a seven year systems change programme that aimed to transform practices and approaches across schools, communities and the education system in the UK from 2004–11, saw that what remained over a decade later, was not the policy or curriculum changes that were made or embedded at the time in the national framework, but the deep agency and capacity of the people and leaders across the system, who continue to ripple out the transformational work into their places. My insights and action research from this work was that the broader impact was the leaders we supported ability to continually cultivate transformation in light of changing circumstances. This was enabled through cultivating their leadership and practice, knitting these together to provide learning and practice support, and curating the insights towards that influenced the wider system.
What has been your experience of what has and hasn’t lasted in these change processes you have been a part of? What has endured and rippled beyond the initial investment?
Funding and resourcing is starting to trickle to organisations that are already being pathfinders for this work, actively designing and building alternative futures. However these people and organisations are not ubiquitous across all places and although they are illuminating the way for others, there is a real lack of valuing of this work and putting resources into the support required from the growing network of relational and systemic offerings who enable the cultivation of systems change.
JRF also see the need for this “larger and more strategic investment in cultivating the capacities for transition — inner, relational, and systemic — that allow these experiments and new models to endure. This is the invisible infrastructure for transition that requires as much resourcing and stewardship as the more concrete initiatives that are rehearsing and demonstrating alternatives… I think this is the single most important lesson from our Emerging Futures work over the past two years.”(link to article)
So what are the roots required? What are the capabilities? What we are seeing is the people’s individual abilities to lead and facilitate and cultivate the collective constellation of people for change, including that of governance, working with money, resources, participatory decision making, that is equity and trauma-informed and centres lived experience. So people can think systemically and work with the complexity and changing world, imagine alternative narratives and support experimentation for them to emerge.
Through Local Motion Learning Academy a group of applied learning practitioners from leading systems change organisations have created the Deep In Place and Practice (DiPP) collective to work across the six communities piloting a place-based developmental, learning led support programme. For Local Motion our learning outcomes, co-created with places are:
- Leading change at the level of self — by finding ways to understand (and accept) their whole self so that they can discover how to use their power effectively in creating change with others. (inner capabilities)
- Designing and holding group processes — for awareness, connection and action; whilst staying in relationship, even in conflict, this includes their ability to facilitate and cultivate the right organising model and governance for how they convene and constellate for change. (relational capabilities)
- Finding ways forward in real-world complexity — supporting experimentation and alternative change narratives to emerge (outer change in complexity)
Capabilities are not enough — we need to create sustained learning infrastructure in context.
*place change makers including: stewards, coordinators, backbone organisations, movement and community organisations — including anchor institutions transitioning their role
What we have also learnt is that just providing the modules and capabilities is not enough, a learning support system and infrastructure is needed alongside so that it is rooted in the contexts of people’s work, help them navigate and choose the different offerings that are relevant for their community and support the collective learning with and for the field.
This learning infrastructure consists of:
- accompanying and coaching their practice and action in place — being transformation companions — to their action and inquiries,
- for this we have used action inquiry as a practical framework to hold the beat and the threads;
- creating peer-support and communities of practice for learning within and across places;
- providing modular learning experiences around different practices — from systems practice, decision making, facilitation, participative leadership, conflict transformation relational system intelligence, collaborative governance, equity and power and storytelling — to name a few.
- connecting and supporting them to navigate and utilise learning offerings from an extensive network of experienced training and practice development practitioners and organisations. Resulting in a creative, adaptable and radical systems change curriculum, the design of which can be adaptable and bespoke depending on the context you are creating for and has the potential to include and keep expanding the practices and practitioners that can be accessed by places
- As well as supporting and articulating the individual and collective stories that can serve as evidence, inspiration for change and start to shift the narrative of what we value and understand as change.
The stance of DiPP practitioners and our relationship with place based change makers has been really critical, as there is understandable resistance from folks in place towards expertise coming from the “outside”, and so careful work needs to be done to lay the ground for genuine trust and partnerships, and humility to centre the innate capacities that already exist in places.
“This work can seem hard and fraught with hurdles , but when done in community, it can feel like a homecoming — a connecting to something deep within us, the answer to a need we all share…”
“This work and learning has really shown what is possible in (my place), so they have the tools and relationships to move deeper in and as a community”
“I have been in this sector for a long time — this for me was a chance to upskill and its filled me with hope and enthusiasm”
“forever changed… I now see things so differently, shifting my time horizon from years to decades”
We live in wild times, it goes without saying that we are facing a backdrop of significant change and turbulence. For many the place making communities feels increasingly fragile, where hope is harder to sustain as social fabric is fraying and growing division is moving from the margins to the mainstream. We need a different orientation to learning — instead of providing outside training or critique and evaluation of the work to move towards a coming alongside people in places, supporting their practice, reawakening what is there — working within and weaving between, helping to find the agency and stories from the inside.
We also need funders to show up as companions too, to help resource the deeper learning and practice support needed so that they can navigate these times, imagine and live into a just, resilient and regenerative future, finding and being supported in their agency to do so.
Acknowledgements: Thank you for all your feedback and conversations that have supported pulling this together, but more importantly the work of the places we have been working with and funders who are also living into this work, and Kathleen Kelly from Local Motion who had the ambition to initiate this work and bring us together. I also want to acknowledge that the example of DiPP and the capabilities we offer is not the only list of amazing work, there are an array of many different great examples that are taking a deliberate approach to learning and practice development in place; and our high dream is to find ways to connect and collaborate together. Thank you also to DiPP collective members and the places we are working with that constantly source of inspiration and learning.
Anna Birney, School of System Change; Lakshnie Hettihewa & Joy Warmington — brap | equality; Jen Parkin, Hidden Routes; Kathleen Kelly, LocalMotion; Lisa Clarke, PG (Practice Governance) Collective; Nairy McMahon, Radial Change & ORSC; Payam Yuce Isik, Tribe and Lewis Deep Democracy; Tanya Akrofi, Wildflower Storytelling