Introduction

Institutional culture change is something that is frequently claimed but is hard to rigorously evidence outcomes in place-based work. Organisations describe themselves as having changed how they relate to communities. And then, often, nothing much changes, or what changes does not last. The reason for wanting to change is clear though, and that is a recognition that if communities are going to assert their power, work as a partner with the state and not be ‘done-to’, then the institutions with power around them need to change how they work too – they have to give up power, work collaboratively, and be receptive to other kinds of place-based work being valuable.

In our taxonomy of place-based change, this pattern of practice is concerned with the process by which state institutions (schools, health services, local authorities, police) shift their basic assumptions about their relationship with the communities they serve. The endpoint is institutional culture change that is durable, that survives leadership turnover, and that produces different services for everyone who uses and works with the institution. The causal chain required to get there is clear. It is also long, and it is not the same thing as delivering a training programme.

The distinction between the activities and the pattern of change is the organising idea of this piece. We draw on four UK cases to explore what the pattern looks like when it is operating, what distinguishes the organisations that have reached genuine structural embedding from those that are still in earlier phases, and what this means for how we evaluate and consider this kind of work.

How institutional culture change works

We do not treat training programmes, workforce development events, or even multi-year professional development as the mechanism of change. They are activities. The mechanism operates when sustained, embedded, relational change processes shift how individual professionals work and when that individual change accumulates, through team norms and structural adjustments, into institutional culture change that persists beyond any single programme or person.

The implementation science evidence is explicit on this point (Fixsen et al., 2005): professional development events do not change practice. What changes practice is sustained, embedded engagement (coaching, reflective supervision, peer learning communities, structural feedback loops) over years, not months. And what changes institutional culture is not that engagement alone, but the structural changes it enables: revised hiring criteria, changed performance frameworks, governance reforms that embed community voice in decision-making. Edgar Schein’s (2010) model of culture change distinguishes between espoused values (what organisations say) and basic assumptions (what they actually do when no one is watching). The pattern is only operating when the latter is shifting.

This gives us a precise diagnostic question for any piece of work claiming to be working on this pattern of place-based practice: have any institutional decisions been reversed specifically because of work with the community, at a level that cost the institution something? If not, the work is still in the early phases, and calling it culture change is premature.

Examples in local government: Wigan and Test Valley

The Wigan Deal, launched in 2012 as a direct response to austerity, is the strongest available UK case of a local authority reaching the later phases of this pattern: the culture change has embedded in institutional processes sufficiently to survive leadership change and to reproduce itself without the original programme architects.

What distinguished Wigan from a communications exercise was the professional development architecture: sustained, structured and embedded across the whole council over multiple years, involving reflective practice, changed supervision culture, and structural changes to how the council measured performance and managed its relationship with residents. The evidence documents improvements in staff morale, resident trust and service innovation over time.

In 2024, Wigan council and partners launched Progress with Unity, a ten-year strategy explicitly framed as a movement for change across the borough, not a council initiative. This represents a shift at basic assumptions level: the institution has changed its model of what a council is for, and that change is now sufficiently embedded to extend beyond the council’s own direct responsibilities. This is Fixsen et al.’s (2005) full implementation stage, where the new practice is reproduced through institutional process rather than individual effort.

Test Valley Borough Council, and their excellent work with Collaborate CIC (who have probably done the most to explore these questions in the UK), offers a detailed UK account of a local authority deliberately rebuilding its institutional culture from the inside over more than a decade. This was not driven by austerity as an external forcing condition, but as a deliberate choice to become what it describes as a “community council”. The activities are distinctive: council values and behaviours were co-created through 50 senior managers across all services, not written by a leadership team and cascaded down. The community councillor role definition, which now begins with community facilitation rather than formal decision-making, was developed with participation from all councillors and agreed by full council.

An LGA Corporate Peer Challenge of October 2025 rated Test Valley in the highest category across systems leadership, place-based working, and organisational development, noting a “strong strategic golden thread” as “part of the council’s DNA”. This peer opinion is consistent with a council approaching the later phases of this work.

Our research insists on considering the ambient social ecology of a place, and Test Valley is very different to Wigan. We must consider what these two (and other) cases both tell us but also accept that they had to both work with the realities of their place. There are always similarities and differences in this work.

What school institutions require: Reach Foundation and PLACE

The Reach Foundation’s training work is the UK’s clearest illustration of the difference between professional development as an activity and professional development as the initiating condition for this pattern of place based work. The distinction is not in the content but in the architecture: sustained professional learning communities, not one-off events; coaching and structured reflection over years, not cascade from a training day.

Reach works with clusters of school leaders to redesign the relationships between schools, families and community support services. What it builds over time, through coaching, through peer learning, through supported structural change, is the conditions under which an institution sustains changed practice without Reach in the room. Schools that engage fully with the model go on to redesign parental engagement policies, attendance frameworks and community liaison structures: the structural changes that distinguish moving from ambition to do this, to starting to embed it. Schein’s language applies precisely: the work targets basic assumptions about what is possible in a school’s relationship with its community, not merely espoused values about engagement. The school itself must the take on what Reach initiates for it to be truly sustained.

PLACE (People, Learning and Community Engagement) is the Tees Valley Education MAT’s approach to operating as an institution embedded in community rather than acting upon it. It illustrates this pattern of place-based work in two related but distinct ways: as internal institutional culture change within the MAT, and as workforce development with the wider education sector. Sean Harris from Tees Valley Education recently spoke to us on our podcast, and it’s worth listening to how that change came about.

What distinguishes PLACE as an example of this pattern is how it began. Rather than moving quickly to designing interventions, the MAT spent considerable time interrogating its own mental models of poverty and disadvantage, testing assumptions held widely across the education sector: that low income equates to low aspiration; that families need to make better choices; that schools are the primary solution. Each assumption was challenged by research and by the voices of children and families. This process of deliberate disconfirmation (testing professional assumptions against evidence and community voice before designing any programme) is the beginning of the pattern working. It produced a basic assumption change visible in institutional language: the MAT actively resists positioning schools as the “beating heart” of communities, recognising that framing schools as isolated solutions overstates their reach and understates the complexity of structural disadvantage.

The structural embedding that followed (PLACE as a directorate within the MAT, with a published theory of change and an independent evaluation by ImpactEd in progress) represents the next phase of this pattern: the institution has changed its architecture to sustain the changed approach beyond the individuals who initiated it.

PLACE also matters as an analytical case because it operates in one of England’s most deprived educational contexts: almost 70% of children eligible for free school meals across Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees and Redcar & Cleveland. This pattern of place-based change is sometimes assumed to be easier in less constrained environments. PLACE shows that the pattern can initiate in contexts of deep structural disadvantage. But the balancing forces that can stop the work achieving change are stronger there (Ofsted pressure, budget constraint, staff turnover) and the risk of reversion is correspondingly higher without structural protection for the changed practice.

What these cases show collectively

Taken together, the four cases reinforce three things that matter for practice and for evaluation.

1. The pattern operates across institutional types. Wigan and Test Valley show it in local government; Reach and PLACE show it in education. The causal chain (sustained professional engagement → individual practice change → team norms → structural embedding → basic assumption change) is consistent across contexts. What varies is the specific activities, the timescale, and the structural barriers to be addressed.

2. The distinction between the middle phases of this pattern and the more embedded phases matters enormously for evaluation. Wigan is the only case here that has clearly reached later phases: structural embedding that survives leadership change. Test Valley is approaching it. Reach Foundation and PLACE are demonstrably in early to middle phases (but there may well be schools going further that we do not know about). Evaluations that treat any institutional development programme as evidence of culture change risk over-claiming; the question is always whether the change would survive if the external partner or instigating leader withdrew tomorrow.

3. The activity/pattern distinction is not pedantic. A local authority that funds a 12-month workforce development programme and expects institutional culture change has misunderstood the timescale and the mechanism of change. All four examples show that the pattern requires sustained relationship, structural change, and time.

The evidence base, and its limits

The evidence base for this work is real but genuinely constrained. Fixsen et al.’s (2005) synthesis of implementation science provides the foundational evidence that sustained, embedded engagement changes professional practice where one-off training does not. Schein (2010) provides the conceptual architecture for understanding what culture change requires. The evidence from Wigan is the strongest available UK local government case, but it is practice example evidence with external evaluation signals.

Attribution of institutional culture change to any specific intervention is genuinely difficult. Multiple forces shape institutional culture simultaneously, and the connection to population outcomes is typically mediated by many other factors. Where we describe outcomes (improvements in resident trust in Wigan, changed attendance frameworks in schools working with Reach) we are describing associations and plausible causal stories, not established attributions. Honest evaluation requires contribution analysis rather than attribution claims, and longitudinal designs that track whether changes persist through leadership and staff turnover.

This is also why our forthcoming pattern book’s diagnostic questions matter as much as its evidence base. Before commissioning this kind of work, the right questions are:

• Is the institutional leadership commitment genuine and senior enough to protect the work?

• Is the timescale realistic, or are we expecting culture change from a 12-month project?

• Are the structural barriers (performance frameworks, HR systems) being addressed, or only the mindset?

• Is there a plan for when the institutional champion leaves? Culture change that lives only in the heads of enthusiasts is not yet culture change.

What this means for practice and commissioning

This pattern of place-based change makes demands that most institutional change programmes are not designed to meet. The timescale is three to seven years at minimum, longer to reach structural embedding. The commitment required from institutional leadership is not to a programme, but to a sustained process of discomfort, one that involves being genuinely open to finding that what the institution has been doing is wrong. The external capacity required to support that process is substantial and cannot be provided on the side by an organisation with other priorities.

The four cases in this post show what this looks like when it works. Wigan did not achieve later phases by running a good training programme; it achieved it by rebuilding what the council rewards, how it measures performance, and what it believes its role is. PLACE did not begin with programme design; it began by spending months interrogating whether its own assumptions about poverty were accurate. The Reach Foundation does not deliver workforce development events; it builds sustained relationships with institutional leadership over years. These are not differences of degree. They are differences of kind.

This work also has a clear limit. Institutional culture change makes institutions more effective and more relational. It does not address the structural resource constraints on those institutions, or the structural inequalities that determine which communities benefit from institutional services. A more relational NHS still cannot meet the full burden of health inequality if the social determinants of health are not addressed. This pattern belongs within a broader theory of change, not as a substitute for one. It must engage with other patterns of place-based practice, and other types of change.

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References

Fixsen, D., Naoom, S., Blase, K., Friedman, R. and Wallace, F. (2005). Implementation Research: A Synthesis of the Literature. Tampa: NIRN.

Schein, E. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Needham, C. and Mangan, C. (2016). The 21st-century public servant. Public Money and Management, 36(4).

Morley, K. and Harris, S. (2025). Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools. London: Bloomsbury.

Wigan Council and Partners (2024). Progress with Unity: Ten-Year Strategy. https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Council/Progress-with-Unity/index.aspx

Collaborate CIC (2026). Neighbourhood Governance in Practice: Lessons from Test Valley. https://www.testvalley.gov.uk/assets/attach/25180/Neighbourhood-Governance-in-Practice-Lessons-from-Test-Valley-for-Democratic-Renewal-FINAL.pdf

SSAT (2026). Developing and Supporting PLACE [blog, 25 March 2026]. https://www.ssatuk.co.uk/blog/developing-and-supporting-place/

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I suppose like a lot of schools, there was definitely a window where we somehow felt of ourselves as the saviour slash fixer of all things locally.

We’ve been guilty of using phrases like ‘this school is the beating heart of the community’… but we’re now using phrases more like ‘we are a vital organ in an ecosystem with others locally.’

Sean Harris: Director of PLACE at Tees Valley Education

Teachers are often some of the closest witnesses to the pressing issues around food insecurity, housing instability and sleep deprivation caused by poverty. But what should their role be in tackling such a complex issue? And how can they balance this with the educational outcomes they are also expected to deliver? Can taking a place lens help?

In the third episode of our podcast Grounded: Stories about how people work to change places, we spoke to Sean Harris about the ways in which education, place and poverty intersect in his work in the Tees Valley Education Trust: a multi-academy trust serving communities across Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland

As well as directing place-based approaches to tackling child poverty; Sean is a doctoral researcher at Teesside University, where he explores child agency to understand poverty in school settings. He is co-author of Tackling Poverty and Disadvantage in Schools and you can read his blog (followed by over 13,000 readers) here: thatpovertyguy.substack.com/

Sean talked to us about how poverty presents in lots of different ways for young people - as explained by a student where Sean works:

‘The thing that people need to understand is poverty is not just about not having money’

Tees Valley student

Sean and his colleagues realised that while education outcomes were high, in some cases above the national average, they were seeing a worsening of wellbeing issues caused by poverty locally. This led them to think more deeply about their role in tackling poverty and disadvantage. Some of the key stages of their work included:

1. Agreeing as a Trust that education alone is not enough to address poverty

2. Embarking on an ongoing exercise of deep listening with communities, to learn more about how poverty is experienced by communities in their area and where the role of the Trust might be in alleviating this.

3. Making some direct adjustments to the way in which they engaged with the community as a result of what they heard. For example, hearing feedback that parents were not interested to read a school newsletter so much as receive a community magazine which included things like tips for good local days out on a budget and recipe ideas.

4. Building a partnerships map to learn more about the local ecosystem and their place within it. They asked themselves the question: ‘How do we make sure that we are doing this alongside other networks and partnerships locally?’

5. When they engaged with other local charities on the idea of setting up a charity for this work, they had the feedback that the area didn’t need another charity! It needed better and more joined up working with the organisations already in place.

6. This led Sean and the team to develop a blueprint for working with others on local issues, coordinate actions and investment. This aimed to unite actors locally, but also regionally and nationally.

7. PLACE (People, Learning and Community Engagement) emerged from this – and the Trust was able to secure funding from FEA and Bloomberg’s Innovation Award to further refine their approach and Theory of Change.

8. Working in partnership on specific, well understood issues meant they were able to attract more investment in the area. This led to some specific tangible projects, such as partnering with the national sleep charity Zarach, to run an initiative around sleep poverty in the area. This included providing bedding packs to children, training 100s of local sleep champions in schools and developing guides around the benefits of good sleep hygiene for young people. Another example involved setting up a vending machine in a primary school to distribute books to children facing disadvantage, in a non-stigmatising way. The books, selected by primary age children comprised a selection of books you should read before you’re 11 and ¾

9. They have also been able to unite and campaign around policy issues, such as the No Child Left Behind free meals for all pupils campaign

10. Ultimately, Sean and colleagues have been able to share their learnings nationally. They have published a book Tackling Poverty & Disadvantage in Schools, aimed at busy school leaders, which offers an analysis of how poverty and disadvantage shows up in schools and how schools can poverty-proof their school days. This has been widely read, contributed to policy and has been named Educational Book of the Year at Education Resources Awards.

Actually, when we do that deep social listening bit, we are able to have a greater commitment to social justice because we actually understand what the barrier might be.

What do we know about how work like this drives change?

We are working to develop a taxonomy of place-based change which outlines five categories for typical approaches for intervening in places. This example particularly fits within Category 3, which seeks to change how institutions understand their relationship to communities and the terms on which that relationship operates:

Here is a breakdown:

What can we learn from this work?

• The Multi-Academy Trust had to think carefully about their role – moving from seeing themselves as the ‘beating heart of the community’ instead to think about itself as one vital organ in a whole system. This connects the thought process that a MAT goes through to other institutions. It means that the mindset work is comparable to work of organisations like Reach Foundation and also what certain authorities, most famously Wigan, have done to reconsider their role with and within communities. Schools aren’t the heart, they’re part, and need to work as such. Local Authorities aren’t the community, they’re a partner with the community with a unique electoral mandate. The NHS isn’t the manager of population health, it is a unique part of the system that influences health. These institutions have a great deal to learn from each other in terms of increasing their receptivity to working in partnership with the community rather than doing ‘to’ the community.

• A coordinated effort that built on a strong problem analysis freed Sean and his partners up from chasing different pots of money, and instead was a stronger proposition for funders who could see they had already got a strong sense of the problems that were sitting in place and how to work together to solve them - a proof of concept and tangible ideas of what was working. This isn’t a full backbone model, but the coordination is part of the local infrastructure of a place. Maybe a school or MAT can be a backbone, but perhaps they are more honestly being a school-led Category 2 approach? This highlights that the coordinating infrastructure of places does not fit neatly into our taxonomy because it is often constructed locally and then takes on different roles. You can more of our analysis on backbones here.

• The importance of being ‘furiously curious’ – to step out of comfort zones of traditional working practice (e.g. the 9-5) and dismantle some of our closely held mental models (e.g. that education can solve poverty) to think more deeply about these issues and how they show up. It requires leaders to start to work in this way – leaders at all levels, who have the capacities to work in a different way. This is perhaps why Reach Foundation leans into leadership training , and why the Relationship Project has established the Relationship Academy – there is much opportunity from encouraging this way of thinking and acting by people across the system of a place.

We will have more to come! If you’re interested to read more about our work you can find our original report here and our ongoing substack here.

We’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, or if you’d like to talk to us about your place. You can reach us at anna@storiesofchange.co.uk or john@storiesofchange.co.uk

“It was really interesting to see the local community, a charity and the local authority coming together around a place - and we actually managed to regenerate it.”

– Atara Fridler, Crisis Centre Development Lead

In our second episode of our new podcast Grounded: Stories about how people work to change places, we spoke to Atara Fridler from Crisis, who shared some reflections about her time living and working in Harlesden, Brent – a period that has spanned over 20 years.

She told us how a small, Saturday afternoon consultation about a local park sewed the seeds for bringing the wider community together to think more purposefully about community regeneration and ultimately removing systemic barriers for people facing homelessness.

The stages of this process were:

1. Improving a local park:

Atara initially worked for Lift, an organisation providing support to people experiencing homelessness in Harlesden. During this time, a local councillor drew their attention to a local park which was neglected and a hotspot of anti-social behaviour. Atara and her team set up a half-day consultation to ask locals what they thought could be done about the park. Together they developed a vision for the park, which incorporated training for people with lived experiences of homelessness. They took this vision document to the local council, who were able to unlock some funding from the GLA to support the project. Now, Harlesden Town Garden is a thriving community garden.

2. Setting up a neighbourhood forum to tackle systemic barriers to homelessness:

Based on this experience, when Lift started to experience increased referrals of people facing eviction and housing need; they decided to set up a local neighbourhood forum, chaired by a local Methodist minister who was supportive of the mission. The neighbourhood forum embarked on an ongoing journey of facilitated neighbourhood planning.

3. Investing in new models of community ownership:, One of the outcomes of the neighbourhood forum was the decision to set up a Community Land Trust in 2020, which has led to a commitment to building 19 new affordable housing units in the area. Proposed image below:

4. Aligning local housing support through a Homelessness Forum: While engaging in all this community regeneration, Atara realised her organisation, Lift, was at risk of shifting its mission away from housing and homelessness into more generic neighbourhood regeneration. She decided to merge with Crisis, which brought more resource into Brent; allowed the team to take a more systemic role and bring together local stakeholders to take a place-based approach, which led to the area commissioning a new housing support service for those people who were being referred through the ‘revolving doors’ of the existing system. More recently they have collectively agreed to adopt the ‘Built for Zero’ model to tackling homelessness. The model involves aligning stakeholders around a specific population - in this case, rough sleepers. Together, stakeholders work to end homelessness for this sub-population by creating a shared ‘by name list’ and carefully tracking progress for these individually identified people through the system. They use what they learn by meeting the needs of this group to move on to new subgroups and ideally improve the system for everyone in the process.

What do we know about how work like this drives change?

We are working on our taxonomy of place based change, which outlines five categories that can help us demystify how change in places works. However, this example shows us that places don’t fit neatly into boxes! The change making process is rarely linear or confined to one category.

The work Atara has been involved in followed a series of stepping stones, which emerged to solve different problems and so spanned multiple categories. Here is a breakdown:

What can we learn from this work?

• The power of starting small: By focussing at first on a local park, Atara and her team were able to tap into local energy and learn more about how changes might be possible on a bigger scale

• Some conflicting priorities: Aligning stakeholders has not always been easy – Atara notes that conflict has been an important part of the journey. However, working through and resolving this conflict has led different people in the system to reflect more critically on the roles they play and what they have to offer.

• Sharing power and not over-shadowing the community: Throughout all this work, Atara and her team had to go on a journey of learning how to offer what the community needed, without getting in the way. This meant they were able to offer support and hold the space for the community to put forward ideas, e.g. around neighbourhood development, which were later adopted by the local authority

We will have more to come! If you’re interested to read more about our work you can find our original report here and our ongoing substack here.

We’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, or if you’d like to talk to us about your place. You can reach us at anna@storiesofchange.co.uk or john@storiesofchange.co.uk

This long post is part of an ongoing series of pieces trying to apply our taxonomy and thinking to practice in place. The concepts and language we use in these is subject to change as we do more research and thinking, but the evidence of practice holds and is of significant value to the field.

Introduction: activity, approach, and mechanism

Backbone organisations continue to be one of the most talked-about features of place-based working. The language originates in the Collective Impact framework (Kania & Kramer, 2011), and in our taxonomy of place-based mechanisms of change it sits within Category 3 (state and civil society relations) because its primary function is to coordinate relationships between state and civil society actors around a shared problem. Colleagues at Place Matters have been looking at different types of infrastructure for place based work because there is such interest in this question, and they see collective impact backbones (the subject of this piece) as just one of those infrastructure types.

Before going further, a conceptual clarification is necessary (building on our language post). In this piece, we do not see the backbone itself as a mechanism of change. It is an activity, and a well-evidenced one (as described below). The chain of effects it enacts is collective impact through collaboration: the process by which coordinated action across organisations with aligned goals produces outcomes that no single actor could achieve alone (Kania & Kramer, 2011; Hanleybrown, Kania & Kramer, 2012). This distinction matters because it gives us a more precise analytical lens. Different organisations (Right to Succeed, Thrive at Five, and others) each have their own approach to backbone working. What they share is the underlying mechanism they are trying to activate. This is not to minimise the scale of complex work required to make a backbone work (and it also enables lots of other activity) but the backbone itself doesn’t drive the whole causal chain we’re interested in.

The Collective Impact literature identifies five conditions for the mechanism to function: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support (Kania & Kramer, 2011). Backbone working is therefore one of five necessary components of collective impact, not a synonym for it. Evaluating backbone organisations well means asking whether all five conditions are present, not just whether a coordinating body exists.

In this piece we draw on two recent evaluations to explore how this works in practice: the Good News Report 2025 and Evaluation Report 2025 for Right to Succeed’s Cradle to Career programme in North Birkenhead (University of Manchester, 2025), and the first-year evaluation of Thrive at Five’s Stoke-on-Trent programme (Centre for Evidence and Implementation, 2024). As with all work on this Substack, our analysis is exploratory and provisional.

The funding architecture: a necessary precondition

Before examining what backbone organisations do in communities, it is essential to address something that is often understated in academic accounts of this model: the extraordinary resource mobilisation required to make it function at all.

As Graeme Duncan at Right to Succeed has put it directly: bringing together commissioning, co-commissioning, philanthropic and statutory funding to create the conditions for change is not a peripheral feature of this work, it is the enabling architecture without which the rest is impossible. It is also, in his words, the primary barrier to why more of this practice does not happen: the fundraising burden is immense, fragmented across funding streams with different timescales, accountability requirements, and decision-making processes.

This observation connects to what Toby Lowe and Dawn Plimmer (2019) describe as the challenge of financing systems change: conventional funding mechanisms are designed for linear, bounded projects, not for the relational and adaptive work of building collaborative systems. The Collective Impact literature itself identifies adequate resourcing of backbone functions as one of the most commonly cited implementation failures (Turner et al., 2012).

The model that Right to Succeed and others are working towards is one in which co-commissioning by statutory bodies, supplemented by philanthropic capital, creates both the funding base and an institutional incentive structure that rewards collaboration over competition. This is significant: it means the funding architecture is not just an operational requirement but is itself shaping the behaviour of partners.

This dimension of backbone working deserves much greater prominence in both research and policy discussions. Evaluations that focus on programme activities without accounting for the funding conditions that made them possible are likely to systematically underestimate the difficulty of replication.

The mechanism: collective impact through collaboration

The Collective Impact framework rests on a specific causal claim: that complex social problems require coordinated, multi-system responses, and that achieving this requires a dedicated infrastructure for coordination rather than relying on informal goodwill (Kania & Kramer, 2011). The mechanism can be described as a four-stage causal process:

1. Structural alignment: governance and accountability structures are established across partner organisations, creating a shared frame (and agenda) for action and reinforcing activities;

2. Relational trust-building: repeated, structured interaction builds the interpersonal and inter-organisational trust necessary for partners to move from coordination to genuine collaboration;

3. Shared learning: common measurement and data infrastructure enables partners to learn collectively, adapt practice, and maintain a shared understanding of progress;

4. System change: sustained collaboration over time begins to alter professional culture, institutional norms, and the distribution of resources, producing outcomes at population level.

The backbone role is to create and maintain the conditions in which this four-stage process can occur. This involves administrative work, but it is far more than administration. It involves data analysis and sense-making, co-design with partners and communities, brokering expertise, building the governance architecture, managing political relationships between institutions, and sustaining the attention of partners over time. To describe this as “administration” would be to significantly underestimate what is required.

Critically, the mechanism also requires a co-productive orientation, working with partners and communities rather than to them. This is not simply a values question; it is an empirical one. The literature on co-production consistently finds that interventions designed without meaningful community or partner involvement have lower implementation fidelity and are less sustainable (Loeffler & Bovaird, 2019; Needham & Carr, 2009). The backbone is most effective not when it delivers on behalf of the system, but when it creates the conditions for the system to work differently.

Two approaches to the same activity

Right to Succeed and Thrive at Five have developed different approaches to activating the mechanism of collective impact through collaboration. Both are evidence-informed; both are evolving through practice; both are national organisations with backbone teams in different locations (more than just the two looked at here). The table below identifies their shared structural features from their evaluations, alongside the specific emphases that reflect each organisation’s model and context.

What the evidence shows

1. Structural alignment precedes relational change

Both evaluations show a similar pattern: the backbone first establishes governance and coordination structures, and this structural work creates the conditions in which relational change can follow. In North Birkenhead, the programme established a governance framework that aligned schools, statutory agencies, and community organisations within a common accountability structure. The relational trust that developed subsequently was, in part, a product of repeated, structured contact within that framework, not simply an organic outcome of co-location.

This matters analytically because it helps distinguish the work from a vaguer account of ‘relationship-building’. The evidence points to something more specific: sustained structural interaction, within a shared framework of accountability and measurement, as the precondition for the trust that enables genuine collaboration. This is consistent with the conditions identified in Huxham & Vangen’s (2005) collaborative advantage framework.

2. Professional culture change as an intermediate outcome

One of the most striking and consistent findings across both evaluations is evidence of professional culture change as an intermediate outcome of the backbone’s work. In North Birkenhead, partners described the experience as a ‘lifestyle change professionally’. In Stoke, workforce surveys showed that staff in the backbone’s operating wards felt significantly more connected and collaborative than those in other areas.

This is significant because culture change of this kind is precisely what the Collective Impact literature predicts should happen as the approach takes effect, and it is an outcome that is often difficult to evidence. The fact that both evaluations capture it, in different ways and in different contexts, strengthens the plausibility of the causal account.

From an analytical perspective, it is also worth noting that culture change of this kind is a lagging indicator. It takes time to develop and is difficult to attribute to any single intervention. The ‘nested impacts’ model described in the North Birkenhead evaluation, in which the backbone changes professional mindsets, which fosters new relationships, which creates opportunities for families, which leads to measured outcomes, is a more plausible causal account than a direct attribution claim, and the evaluations are appropriately cautious about the latter.

3. Quantitative evidence of impact

The North Birkenhead evaluation provides quantitative evidence that is, even with appropriate caution about attribution, highly significant:

• A 20% reduction in re-referrals to social care;

• Nearly double the rate of child protection ‘step-downs’ compared to the local authority average;

• A 15-month reading gap closed across four school year groups over three years.

The Stoke evaluation that we looked at for this piece was at too early a stage to report equivalent outcomes data (the next year is out very soon). However, the GLD framework provides the shared measurement infrastructure through which such evidence is already being generated.

• In the last academic year, the seven primary schools recorded an 11.4 percentage point increase in FSM-eligible children achieving a GLD (52.8% in 2024 to 64.2% in 2025)

• More information can be found on the Thrive at Five website

4. The ‘invisible work’ problem

A critical finding across both evaluations is what we might call the ‘invisible work’ problem. Much of the backbone’s most important function (building trust, managing political relationships between institutions, creating the governance conditions for collaboration, sustaining the attention of busy partners) is largely unseen by those outside the process.

This invisibility has practical consequences. Partners and funders consistently underestimate the resource required to sustain backbone functions. When the backbone is effective, it is tempting to conclude that the coordination ‘runs itself’, which is precisely when the risk of under-resourcing is highest. Both evaluations identify this as a significant threat.

Sustainability: a more precise framing

An earlier version of our analysis described backbone organisations as a ‘temporary scaffold’ or a ‘prosthetic’ functioning best over a five-to-ten-year period, after which the system would operate differently without them. We have revised this framing in response to challenge from both Thrive at Five and Right to Succeed, and we think the challenge is well-founded.

The problem with the scaffold metaphor is that it implies a clean handover: the scaffold comes down, the building stands. The evidence does not support that picture. What it shows instead is something more complex:

• Individual programmes and activities that the backbone has established (such as NELI in Stoke) can in many cases be sustained by the existing system, as Thrive at Five’s evaluation notes.

• The backbone functions themselves (strategic coordination, governance architecture, maintaining the shared measurement infrastructure, managing political relationships between institutions) are harder to embed. They require ongoing capacity of a kind that stressed statutory systems typically do not have.

• There is a real risk, documented in North Birkenhead, that a highly effective backbone creates a dependency: partners have not developed the ‘muscle’ to do the coordination themselves, because the backbone has always done it.

A more precise framing is therefore: the question is not whether the backbone should be temporary or permanent, but what needs to change in the wider system for the coordination function to be sustained without ongoing external resource. This is different for different types of backbone activity. Administrative and logistical functions may be transferable to statutory bodies. Strategic coordination and system stewardship, which require a degree of neutrality and political independence that statutory bodies often cannot provide, may require a different answer.

Thrive at Five’s framing of their own sustainability work is instructive here. They distinguish between sustainability of specific programmes (which can in many cases be achieved) and sustainability of the overall coordinating approach (which is a live question requiring explicit planning by systems leaders). Any exit from a programme of this kind is not, as they note, a cliff edge, it is a phased transition that requires deliberate design. This is consistent with the wider literature on systems change, which identifies transition planning as one of the least well-evidenced but most consequential aspects of complex social interventions (Lowe & Plimmer, 2019).

Conclusions

Drawing together what both evaluations show, our analysis suggests the following conclusions:

1. The mechanism of collective impact through collaboration is well-evidenced at the level of intermediate outcomes (structural alignment, professional culture change, increased collaboration) and, in the more mature programme, at the level of population outcomes (reading gaps closed, social care step-downs, improving GLD rates). The evidence is strongest for the intermediate outcomes; the attribution chain to population outcomes, while plausible and evidenced in North Birkenhead, remains difficult to establish with certainty in complex systems.

2. The resource mobilisation function is a necessary precondition for the mechanism to operate. It is also the primary barrier to replication. Evaluations that do not account for this are likely to be misleading about what it takes to implement these models.

3. The backbone’s work involves a distinctive combination of administrative, analytical, relational, and political functions. Descriptions that reduce it to administration significantly understate what is required and what is being funded.

4. Sustainability requires a more precise framing than the ‘temporary scaffold’ metaphor allows. The question is not whether to sustain the backbone, but which functions of the backbone can be transferred to the wider system, and which require an ongoing coordinating capacity of some kind.

The overall picture is one of models that are generating genuine learning and genuine results, working through a mechanism that is theoretically coherent and increasingly empirically supported. Thrive at Five and Right to Succeed are collectively demonstrating what it looks like to build and sustain this kind of collaborative infrastructure over time. That is both a massive service to the communities they are working in and a significant contribution to the field.

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References

Centre for Evidence and Implementation (2024). Thrive at Five Stoke-on-Trent: Year 1 Evaluation Report. London: CEI.

Hanleybrown, F., Kania, J. & Kramer, M. (2012). Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work. Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Huxham, C. & Vangen, S. (2005). Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kania, J. & Kramer, M. (2011). Collective Impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011.

Loeffler, E. & Bovaird, T. (2019). Co-commissioning of public services and outcomes in the UK: Bringing co-production into the strategic commissioning cycle. Public Money & Management, 39(4), 241–252.

Lowe, T. & Plimmer, D. (2019). Exploring the New World: Practical Insights for Funding, Commissioning and Managing in Complexity. Collaborate CIC / Basis.

Needham, C. & Carr, S. (2009). Co-production: An Emerging Evidence Base for Adult Social Care Transformation. SCIE Research Briefing 31. London: Social Care Institute for Excellence.

OECD (2020). Better Governance, Planning and Services in Local Governments through Collaboration. OECD Public Governance Policy Papers No. 4.

Turner, S., Merchant, K., Kania, J. & Martin, E. (2012). Understanding the Value of Backbone Organisations in Collective Impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review.

University of Manchester (2025). Cradle to Career North Birkenhead: Good News Report 2025 and Evaluation Report 2025. Manchester: University of Manchester.

In the first episode of our new podcast Grounded: Stories about how people work to change places, we spoke to Stephen Skeet who has been living and working in Ipswich for most of his life.

We learnt from Stephen about some of the work he has been involved in to open up spaces for youth voice in Ipswich, which over time have led to systemic, place-wide change.

Broadly, the stages of the work were:

1. A small group of young residents built trust and developed a vision for change: Volunteering Matters and collaborators began working with a small group of young women from migrant communities who had experienced exploitation: Women Against Sexual Exploitation and Violence Speak Up (WASSUP). They were able to provide a safe space for the group which for the group, allowed them to connect with one another, bond over shared experiences and ultimately build a collective vision for how they could work to improve their town.

2. The place began to pay attention: The WASSUP group grew into a more established Youth Social Action programme with more members, winning Volunteer Team of the Year from Third Sector Awards in 2018. Local institutions began to invite young people to run takeovers and share their views about the town around them. Stephen and colleagues began to be able to codify their process and provide the institutions resources to run their own youth voice practice. Over time this led to over 50 organisations signing up to the Power of Youth Charter[1]

3. Ipswich started to become known for place-based approaches and influence at the national level: Ipswich became the UK’s first “Town of Youth Social Action” in 2023[2]. It is home to various place-based approaches, including Sport England’s Active Partnership for Suffolk, a place-based approach designed to tackle inequalities in activity levels and an Arts Council funded Creative people and places partnership, IP-Switched which seeks to create a more inclusive, creative town for everyone. In 2025, young people in Ipswich were able to contribute to the shaping of the DCMS National Youth Strategy through two #DeliverYou hack events

How can we understand what drives change in examples like this?

Of the five categories in our taxonomy, this work resonates most with Category 1: Continuous Local social Change – in which self-organising communities work to improve their place.

We’re working on some emerging thinking about the types of mechanisms we’d expect to see in Category 1 approaches. Our early thoughts are:

1. Opportunities for connection (relational) – holding space for people to connect to one another and form supportive networks that help the community uncover assets and needs that were previously hidden and build a sense of ‘generalised reciprocity’ across the group.

2. Creating places of belonging (spatial) – physical spaces become welcoming to community groups and individuals, which supports interactions between people across typical demographic/status divisions and fosters the chance for people to ‘bump’ into one another and strengthen relationships over time

3. Building public power (agential) – supporting residents to become agents of change in their localities. This may include reframing of understanding of issues and building a sense of agency and collective efficacy.

4. Outlasting project timelines (temporal)– avoiding being constrained by specific projects in order to keep hold of the longer term vision for ambitious and ongoing change. This serves to build trust and hold relationships in place, even when there is no project active (or funding present)

How did we see this play out in Ipswich?

Thinking more about how this played out in Ipswich can tell us a little more about the implications of these ways of working for those involved:

We will have more episodes to come. If you’re interested to read more about our work you can find our original report here and our ongoing Substack here .

We’d love to hear from you if you have any comments or questions, or if you’d like to talk to us about place. You can reach us at anna@storiesofchange.co.uk or john@storiesofchange.co.uk

[1] The Power of Youth Charter

[2] You can see more about how Ipswich became a town of social action in this short film Becoming a Town of Social Action (with Subtitles) made by #iWill Movement team, Ipswich Ambassadors and filmmaker Kezia Tan

As a long-term fan of the work of AllChild, and also after working with the team there at the start of 2025 on thinking about a ‘place’ theory of change for the organisation, I was pleased to see the publication of the first year reflection from the Coram team who are the learning partner for the work of AllChild as they move to Wigan.

Firstly, it’s just great that organisations publish their learning partner work – as often this valuable insight is held within organisations – and secondly, I was interested in the question of place in the AllChild work as it begins to embed in a new community.

For those of us who see things through the place lens, I find it a helpful reminder when I talk to Louisa, the CEO of AllChild, that they don’t just centre that. Yes, there is a strong and growing place-based element to AllChild, but it is also a codified programme with a clear centrality of the trusted adult relationship for specific young people. That is an incredibly valuable mechanism of change for young people, that on its own is not one that is about place. What is so interesting, and I think impactful, about AllChild is that it’s both/and not either/or when it comes to place. As the model is developing, I think it’s become more place-and, and I think that’s going to teach us all a great deal.[1]

I won’t summarise the Coram work here – they have produced a clear and concise document – but what I want to do it reflect on it in terms of some of the questions of place and mechanisms of change in place-based work, and how AllChild’s work highlights the nuance that is so important to consider.

Where do we locate AllChild?

AllChild is classified as a Category 3: State and Civil Society Relations intervention, in our taxonomy. For that to be so, it must be both a charity/organisation delivering support for specific children, and infrastructure designed to reconfigure how state services (schools, social care) and civil society (charities, community groups) interact around children in general. The Coram report described that happening.

In our first report we defined this sort of work as being a service-led mechanism, but we know that needs tightening as a mechanism of change. We want to break that issue down much more in what we do in the coming months across the categories, and I want to start to explore that here.

Our early thinking is that this mechanism is more about innovation programme-to-system change. The mechanism has two distinct phases. First, programme innovation: delivering in ways that are co-produced, evidence-generating and contextually rich. Second, system influence: using the evidence to engage commissioners, policymakers and service leaders. Delivering an excellent innovation programme without the second phase is valuable work but not a place-based mechanism.

What kind of place-based work are we talking about?

AllChild does not attempt to change the whole population directly; it identifies a specific “at-risk” cohort using data (e.g., attendance, social-emotional scores). It then mobilises a “pipeline” of support around these individuals. Perhaps we could usefully consider learning from Targeted Universalism here, as the logic of targeting a group to fix a wider system flows from that thinking. Under that sit a few potential crucial elements of the mechanism that can be seen in the Coram report and which are place-based, and as with the Big Local review I wrote last year, I’m using this to consider what might be the ways to understand and evidence in our next stage of work, so these are just early thoughts:

• Merging state and civil society responsibilities: The Link Worker is embedded in the school but acts as a “boundary spanner,” (a role that connects individuals and institutions across organisational boundaries) bridging the gap between the child, the family, the school, and external services. In the recent Wigan expansion, this was adapted to include statutory “Early Help” assessments, effectively merging a state function with a civil society role. This enables it to more concretely influence and change how the whole of place works, as it is shaping state practice more.

• Coordination and alignment: AllChild does not act as a “Backbone” organisation in the sense of Collective Impact methodologies - it is too centred around the impact programme to be neutral - but it shares many features with a backbone and perhaps underlines that we need to think much harder about what is and isn’t a backbone. It does not deliver all interventions itself but coordinates a network of local Delivery Partners (VCFSEs) to provide specialist support (e.g., arts, therapy, sports), ensuring that disparate resources are focused on the same children. A lot of that sounds like a backbone. The question is whether and how this work shifts how all resources in that place flow around local systems.

• Contextual calibration: In its expansion to Wigan, AllChild utilised a “feasibility and co-design” process. It spent 6-18 months understanding the local context and aligning values with the Local Authority before delivery. This is not a rigid “franchise” model, but it is also not designed afresh in the place. It is one that adapts to local institutional needs, e.g., focusing on school exclusions in Wigan because that was a local priority.

Interaction with non-place-based elements

There are some important elements to the model that are less about place. They include:

• A tight cohort focus

• Clear, standardised metrics

• Managed delivery logic

This highlights how the organisations using mechanisms operating in category three in our taxonomy are especially likely to bring place-based and non-place-based mechanisms of change together, working with whole places and specific individuals at the same time. This is important for those of us looking to understand the field of practice, and I want to dwell on it more in the months ahead. This is a part of their strength and not a weakness.

Evidence

What does this tell us about evidencing this mechanism of change?

What we know (the mechanism works relationally):

• Coordination improves visibility: Schools report that AllChild improves their awareness of and connection to local civil society organisations, suggesting the networking is effective at a professional level.

• Trust is generated through the role: Qualitative evidence from Wigan strongly suggests the “Link Worker” successfully builds trust and safety for children, leading to improved self-regulation and confidence.

What we don’t know (the attribution problem):

• The “dosage” dilemma: It is difficult to prove that the specific “dosage” of AllChild support caused a change, as opposed to the myriad other factors in a child’s life (school, economy, housing). Isolating the intervention in a complex place-based system is methodologically fraught, and it risks undervaluing the work of grass roots and civil society organisations. We need to be clear about this.

• System change: While there is evidence of better connections between professionals, there is limited evidence yet that the system itself (how the state operates) has fundamentally changed or that these changes will sustain without AllChild’s presence. To be fair, they’ve only been there a year, so that would be a tough ask!

This is a one-year learning update, not a final study, and I know the team is already evolving practice through ongoing learning. But it points to many trends in the wider evidence base of place-based approaches, both the relational strengths and the complexity challenges.

Strengthening AllChild using place-based thinking

Finally, as we’re considering what other mechanisms we’re seeing in our research as we go deeper into the categories, I wondered whether a few other elements could help AllChild think about its work:

• Perhaps “System Convening” should be the target: Based on the Coram work, AllChild acts as a coordinator. But the experience of the last couple of years is already encouraging the team to think about moving from “managing” partners to System Convening. This involves not just making referrals, but actively nurturing “social learning” between the school, the family, and the council. The goal would be to change the culture of the school (e.g., how it handles exclusions) rather than just buffering the impact on the child. This is a nuance of the backbone approach and one for us to consider as we deepen our understanding of that mechanism.

• Further integrate “connective scaffolding” (this would be in our Category 1 set of mechanisms): There is already a target for children and families to have their own networks of support that persist after the two-year programme ends. This sort of connective scaffolding, (like the work of Grapevine) is about codifying how to support families to do this as part of the link worker model. I really hope future years of the Coram work or other work from AllChild articulates how they do this for a whole place through targeted universalism, as the field has so much to learn about how to do this well. I know that the team are thinking about this role.

• Measurement for learning: To address the “attribution problem,” AllChild could pivot its evidence strategy towards contribution analysis and system health indicators. Instead of trying to prove “we have helped this child,” the evidence would focus on “how did we improve the health of the support system around this child?” and “what learning loops did we enable?”. This aligns better with the complex reality of place-based work but potentially weakens the relationship with the local and national state, and with philanthropy, that all wants to know about the child. This is an incredibly tough line to tread.

AllChild is a highly impactful model, that does incredible work in the communities it works. Learning from these models about how they drive change and better understanding what is and isn’t place based about that, is a valuable way to challenge those of us who advocate place-based approaches to see the whole picture in practice.

As we continue to review the evidence base around place-based approaches, we’re going to keep highlighting studies, reports and papers that allow us to bring this evidence base around mechanisms of change to life.

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[1] As referenced in this piece on language, we define place-based change as mechanisms of social change that attempt to shift the infrastructure of a place (social, state, market or environmental) to achieve change, and not work with the individual members of the place. A non-place-based mechanism of change would be one that understands change as happening because of direct support to five children who need to build trusting relationships, a place-based mechanism would look at how all children in that place are able to build relationships of trust.

There’s was an interesting post on Centre for Cities’ site last week that caught my eye. It contained the lines:

The country cannot spend more unless it produces more. And as voters experience the national economy within a few miles of where they live and work, any community interventions to improve social trust have to run alongside the local growth agenda if they are to work.

This provokes three responses from me:

1. Why are those two agendas (community power and local growth) separate?

2. Why do those working on those agendas think they’re different?

3. Is keeping them apart actually the problem?

I thought about it more as I read this piece on Warrington (following the publication of the 2026 Cities Outlook), talking about the strengths of the place’s economy, but also the ongoing inequality and rising interest in populist politics locally.

Growth is often missing from place

I know that the authors make a strong, positive call to invest in local government. But I also think they were making the implicit case that you have to prioritise community power or economic growth. This can be seen in a range of national policies, such as the lack of reference to power in the economic growth mission, which points towards industries and labour rather than places.

I think looking at place-based approaches can lift us out of this either/or binary into something more holistic and nuanced.

In our taxonomy of place based change, we identified the different mechanisms required for place based change. In our taxonomy, Category 4 explores market interventions, and we break this down in more detail below.

When we developed our categories, we received the most buy in and engagement with the first three – continuous local social change, civil society organisation led change and rebalancing state and civil society. That is where most people working on place in the UK are focusing their efforts.

Many people who engaged with the work found category four - market interventions - harder to conceptualise because it is often further from people and communities in terms of design and delivery in the UK. I think it is the key to unlocking the competing agenda problem, because it points at the difficulties of our policy landscape, and poses questions for how we could work with that in a way that can then be plugged into a range of other place-based practice. The mechanisms of how category four works are crucial, because they begin to make this bold claim more real.

Place-based work and markets

Category four is work that ‘links macro-economic change -shifting the incentives, economic behaviours and decisions of employers, workforce and educators- with microeconomic change- influencing the incentives and economic behaviours of people who live and work in place, such as in housing or in business start-ups.’

At its heart, this is about creating connections between different scales. What do you do to connect people to their local economy when structural influences such as regional economic factors and travel to work patters feel too big to affect locally?

We still have lots of work to do to develop our understanding of this, but I think we can see a few types of market-focussed place-based mechanisms:

• those that try and encourage a flow of capital into a place

• those that try and encourage a flow of value into a place,

• those that encourage a flow of people around places.

A. Flow of Capital (Investment comes IN)

This is often the work that feels less place-based and is hardest to make real to communities and smaller geographies. It includes things like facilitating agglomeration, from the work of people like Edward Glaeser. This is designed to reduce friction to encourage density/clustering of firms, which should boost productivity in tradable sectors, and connect local recruitment, skill development and insight into that. The question is how to get those connections right. It’s also some of the asset capitalisation ideas, such as Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to pull future value into the present to fund infrastructure, and give places control over that (there are plenty of ways in which this could be done collaboratively, but evidence suggests it is often not).

B. Flow of Value (Wealth stays IN)

This is where there are some interesting and clear models of place-based approaches. It includes anchor leveraging (Community Wealth Building) work, best known in the UK in the Preston Model, and championed by CLES and others. It is designed to stop the “leakage” of capital by localising supply chains and connecting the assets of anchors institutions to local priorities. There can also be work on investing in the foundational economy (Foundational Economy Collective), raising wages in non-tradable sectors (care/food) to boost local disposable income, connecting macro policies to local spending power of residents. And perhaps most common in the UK are versions of pluralising ownership through approaches like community business models and community asset development, although cooperatives and municipal ownership models could also sit here and are more common in examples like Mondragón.

C. Flow of People (people moves OUT/AROUND)

Finally, there are, with economic questions, important considerations about how people might move to work and opportunities and not just incentivise investment to come to places.

This can be very ugly, if understood as a way to slowly shut down places that haven’t been invested in, or placing the responsibility for movement solely on an individual.

It can, however, look like incentivised mobility, such as through Moving to Opportunity in the US, which supported residents to move from their home community to achieve better outcomes.

This structure of understanding the mechanisms will likely change as we do more work, but all of them brings questions closer to communities, and place-based levers of change. This allows them to be integrated with other place-based work, and stops them feeling distant and like somebody else’s GDP.

Places as more than markets

I read the Cities Outlook each year and think that Centre for Cities do important and useful work. But I think the framing of their work can get coopted into an analysis of place, economy and community that is siloed: one budget for this, one policy for that.

From our work on the taxonomy, when we think about it from the perspective of the place, it is clear we need many (if not all) mechanisms operating in symbiosis in order to drive and support change at the local level – much of the work in category four, for example, would rely on the work of organisations also using category one and two approaches.

Considering policy through the lens of place-based working allows us to see that Warrington could be doing well in certain ways, perhaps (as the Guardian article suggests) it has some good mechanisms for bringing investment in to the town, but it also has a persistent geographic inequality. If we’re not seeing how that investment is retained, how it connects to local civil society organisations, how grassroots local social change is enlivened by it and social infrastructure is developed, how purposeful partnerships between the state and civil society can increase their impact as a result of it, then it risks disconnecting the place. A holistic place-based approach could do this differently.

Thinking at the place level can show us how community power and local growth are all part of the same local dynamics. We understand why the siloed approach to places persists, particularly in terms of a ‘Treasury view’ and the complicated reality of pursuing a holistic view within communities. It can be expensive in the short-term and not show immediate results. But as we described in the piece we wrote for New Local, local government can take a significant role here as the think about Pride in Place (amongst other interventions), and so too could combined authorities as they think about approaches like the place-based budget pilots. There are ways to move this argument forward practically, strategically and impactfully. We are going to be looking for more examples of approaches that try to do this.

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I’ve been adjacent to Big Local since it began, working at Renaisi when colleagues were part of setting it up and managing the Reps in the early years, pitching to do evaluations or learning projects with the team, and considering the work as a major example of place based working in the UK as it matured and more actors became interested in place. But I have never been in it – never worked closely with a Big Local area, never been part of the process in the way that many have. That position has given me a feeling for many years that I know quite a lot about it but also like I do not really have a keen sense of how Big Local achieves change. As it’s been winding down, the ICON work has been particularly good at using Big Local to advocate for more money to neighbourhoods, but I don’t think they’ve articulated how it has achieved change for those areas.

As a result, I’m greatly anticipating the forthcoming sharing of all the evaluative work about the programme in January, and have been a little nervous that it will come too late to give clear lessons for all the Pride in Place and other money that’s already starting to spread to places. Will we lose the insight on how these approaches do and do not work and under what conditions?

For those reasons, the work of Anna Dent, James Plunkett and Eleri Thomas was particularly welcome, and I immediately recognised much of what I liked about the Big Local approach.

Those who have read our work will see some similarities between the example of Big Local as described by Kinship and wider evidence of place-based approaches:

1. Big Local areas have used approaches that fit into our first two categories of place-based approaches: continuous local social change and civil society organisation led change.

2. The evidentiary gap was made clear: the Kinship team highlight that if applying a bureaucratic or state-led, population-level understanding to change from Big Local, then changes were small. But that misses the value created for civic capacity. In our taxonomy, that would look like using category three and four metrics to measure category one and two approaches – the major conclusion of our review of place-based work and evidence is to not do that!

3. Rewilding civic approaches: the key conclusion from the work is that we should be looking to rewild these civic approaches and value them. Our view of the categories is that they all have value, and too often those working in one perspective (the state) might devalue these civic approaches and not see the value of these holistic, positive, relational and preventative approaches that the Kinship review highlights so well.

Mechanisms of Big Local

There’s lots more in the Kinship report, and I would encourage you to read it, but given our work is focussed on the mechanisms of place-based work, and we’re already thinking about how to go into more detail into this in the new year, I wanted to use this work to pinpoint some rough ideas of the mechanisms of Big Local. In the year ahead we want to build a full bank of the mechanisms of place-based work that flow from our first study, so this is just a flavour of that using this helpful report.

I wonder if these resonate for those who know more about what the programme has actually done? These are purposefully rough, and I have not tried to dig further into the how, but I have tried to think how the learning from Big Local could be ordered into clear appraoches. If these were to hold, then we could look for other programmes and interventions that take these approaches and build our clearer evidence bases for the particularlity of how they work, and how to understand change, quality, value and effect.

Continuous Local Social Change Mechanisms

Category definition: Self-organising communities working to improve their place, typically using mechanisms like mutuality, physical space, and activism.

1. “Micro-interactions”

Big Local areas heavily utilised approaches of reciprocity and informal exchange, which are core to Category 1’s focus on “social infrastructure”, and these could all be seeb as a focus on the micro-interactions which build a sense of shared, whole community, relational approaches that generate connection and activities to connect.

• Exchange Schemes: Projects established “clubs for sharing and swapping,” such as tool libraries, book swaps, and exchanges for children’s clothes.

• Peer Support: The work facilitated residents lending support to neighbours (e.g., household items or favours), which was later repaid, directly repairing the “bonds of social capital”.

• Holistic Activities: Rather than transactional services, areas ran “something between a service and a club,” such as community lunches, parent groups, and sewing classes where professionals (like therapists) were invited to join as participants rather than providers.

All of these were about building micro-interactions between people over time.

2. “Habitats”

Our taxonomy identifies “physical space” as a key broad mechanism for Category 1. Big Local explicitly treated this as creating “habitats” for civic life, and we could dig further into how there are different types of spaces (are they different mechanisms or just versions of the same?).

• Community Assets: Over two-thirds of Big Local areas invested in physical spaces like community centres, parks, and playgrounds. There has been a wide variety of studies on the value of assets that this could interact with.

• “Bumping” Spaces: These spaces were designed to foster casual encounters (or “micro interactions”) that repair the relational fabric, such as inviting isolated residents in for a cup of tea without the pressure of a formal service assessment.

3. Resident Control

Category one relies on “self-defined” communities and “activist” mindsets, and so a key mechanism must be one of a powerful sense of control and ownership over the work. In Big Local that had two strong elements:

• The 51% Rule: A structural mechanism requiring that at least 51% of the decision-making partnership members were residents, ensuring the community held the balance of power.

• Unrestricted Time & Funds: Providing 10-15 years of “no strings attached” funding allowed residents to follow their instincts, make mistakes, and adapt, rather than fulfilling a funder’s pre-set agenda, and whilst that’s not quite ‘continuous’, it definitely gives the sense for those involved that it has a much longer horizon than a programme, and the work will likely continue beyond Big Local.

There are many models of resident control and democratic decision making, so situating this within that broader literature and evidence will be essential to really help others learn from how Big Local used this.

Civil Society Organisation Led Change Mechanisms

Category definition: Organisations using assets to support the development of social, relational, and community capital, often via networking and linking leaders.

1. Resourceful Approach to Assets

The taxonomy highlights “Identifying assets” as a primary mechanism for this category. Big Local areas adopted a “resourceful” instinct consistent with Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).

• Repurposing Assets: Instead of building from scratch, projects often repurposed existing materials or services, such as extending a school’s opening hours to offer a warm space or running advice drop-ins at a local supermarket.

• Positive Framing: The work systematically reframed the narrative from “what’s wrong” (deprivation) to “what’s strong” (local pride, hopes, and talents), tapping into latent energy that bureaucratic methods miss.

This poses really interesting questions about how to think about the work on assets, which is different to some of the other evidence in this space on asset acquisition and ownership. There is a lot here that could be learnt from about how Big Local enabled this way of being resourceful for the community’s sense of assets.

2. Connective tissue

Category two works by “networking civil society organisations” to create a tighter mesh of support. In Big Local there are two really clear elements of this.

• Locally Trusted Organisations (LTOs): Funding was distributed not to the residents directly but through an LTO (a local charity or body) nominated by the community to function as the legal and financial “safe pair of hands”.

• Connective Tissue: Big Local funding often paid for the “connective tissue” between existing services, linking charities and public services together so they worked as a coherent mesh rather than isolated silos.

What’s interesting is the role of the central organisation, and how it and others hold the connective tissue. Is there a Big Local way to do this?

3. Linking Community Leaders (Capacity Building)

The taxonomy highlights “Linking community leaders” as a key mechanism in this category and Big Local focused intensely on growing local governance capability.

• Governance as a Learned Capability: The programme treated governance not as a compliance task but as a skill to be “grown like a scaffold” around the work.

• Skill Transfer: 84% of partnership members reported learning new things, and many residents moved from informal volunteering into formal roles or established new community interest companies (CICs).

This opens up a question of how leaders are built over time, and there is so much learning about community leadership development is already coming from Big Local. It could be so valuable to understand this more.

Understanding the value of mechanisms

What this quick exercise has done for me, is to underline that there is a great deal to be learnt from Big Local if we take the mechanism lens, but that at the moment I have no clear idea of what the Big Local learning would tell me ‘good’ looks like on some of these. If we were, for example, to look at the LTO as part of networking civil society, it is clear that in the approach, that organisation had a significant role – they could hold the local governance of the place together, they could network others, connect leaders, or they could just hold the money and let other actors take on those governance roles.

What does good look like in doing either of those things? How would I know how to support an organisation to take on that role well? This is the stuff that matters as we move forwards – with Pride in Place, the Community Wealth Fund and myriad other programmes that are interested in these questions of civic renewal. If we are going to rewild this work, we need to rewild it well. That does not mean controlling it – but it does mean knowing a little more clearly what it takes to do it well, and to help those doing it.

Whole places

We believe that place-based working is a field of practice. We believe that there is commonality across that field, and diversity between the categories. We want to do more work next year digging into the mechanisms of change that make up those categories, and we also want to look at how those categories of practice interact.

One of the responses to our first report was that it can put places into boxes, and we are clear that it should not. Every place will use multiple mechanisms all the time, the question should be how they interact in a supportive way to play to all their strengths and support the change and ambition that communities want. For that reason, I want to see a rewilding of these approaches, but I also want to see ways for the distinct categories to work together.

In a Pride in Place area, for example, there is also going to be the local NHS thinking about neighbourhood health, there is going to be a Better Start Hub, there is going to be other philanthropic activity, there are going to be charities working in partnership with the state on specific outcomes, there are going to be schools rethinking their role. All of this is going to shape the place, and we should see the civic mechanisms that Big Local gives us so much potential insight into, as one piece in the jigsaw of place, and not something to grow in isolation.

We’re going to be thinking in much more detail about mechanisms next year, and if that interests you too, then please get in touch, and sign up to SubStack to hear more.

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