Stronger together
Working with Communities and Partners.
A day on leading beyond your own organisation: understanding community, building on its assets, and making partnerships work in practice.
- Level
- Immerse
- Learning time
- 9 hours
- Where
- Communities and systems
- Price
- £249
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Leaders working across organisations and with communities
Overview
No organisation, acting alone, delivers the outcomes communities want. Stronger together is about leading beyond your own organisation. It begins with what we mean by community, drawing on Wenger and Putnam, and with the participation ladder from informing to empowering. It then builds on what places already have through McKnight and Kretzmann's asset-based community development and community strategies that deliver. Partnership working follows: definitions, leading without holding the controls, Huxham and Vangen's collaborative advantage, Collective Impact and its critics, and practical machinery. Co-production, negotiation and coalition building complete the toolkit, with capstone cases from Merthyr Tennis Club to Compassionate Frome.
Aims
This programme aims to develop leaders who can work effectively across organisational boundaries and alongside communities, building on local strengths rather than deficits. It develops the relational leadership, influencing skills and partnership discipline needed to carry shared outcomes without formal control, and to turn shared ambition into delivery.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Explain how community, participation and partnership are understood, and assess the strengths and assets a place already holds.
- Design partnership arrangements and community strategies with clear purpose, governance and machinery that turn shared ambition into delivery.
- Lead across organisations and with communities by building trust, managing power, negotiating fairly and sustaining coalitions over time.
What you'll develop
By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:
- Apply the four lenses of geographic, interest, identity and practice communities to a real place, naming the communities your work is likely to miss.
- Apply McKnight and Kretzmann's five building blocks to map the assets already present in a place, and distinguish this from stakeholder mapping.
- Distinguish a wish list from a delivered community strategy using the four requirements of shared vision, narrow priorities, a named delivery mechanism and a review cycle.
- Explain why every partnership is contested space and use four practical moves to bring negotiated goals, unequal power, working assumptions and competing accountabilities into the open.
- Apply the four-item checklist of written purpose, named roles, agreed resource and timeline, and a fixed first review date before a partnership launches.
- Explain collaborative advantage and collaborative inertia and identify the four themes of aims, power, trust and membership that make collaboration hard.
- Describe the five conditions of Collective Impact and explain what a credible backbone function does.
- Map stakeholders on a power and interest grid and plan how to engage each quadrant.
Built from 7 parts.
9 hours of learning.
- 01Rungs of real influenceCommunity and the Participation LadderBitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules
- 02Building on what is strongAsset-based community development (ABCD)Bitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules
- 03Better togetherPartnership working and collaborative leadershipBitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules
- 04Making it work across boundariesCo-production and cross-organisational workingBitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships2 modules
- 05Partnership in the real worldCommunity and partnership case studiesBitesize · Working with Communities and Partnerships1 module
- 06Trust as the real currencyRelational leadership and Collective ImpactBitesize · Systems Leadership2 modules
- 07Alliances and corridorsCoalition building and office politicsBitesize · Influence, Persuasion and Negotiation2 modules