What to focus on

What to focus on

• Taking a balanced approach to risk, rights and responsibilities. You should think about the risks and impacts of both acting and not acting.
• Removing the fear of being blamed if things go wrong.
• Encouraging an open culture that recognises and learns from mistakes.
• Using risk registers so you can see any opportunities that come with risks.
• Talking to others from similar projects about their journey, and what they learned from their successes and mistakes.

What to focus on

• Public service organisations including:
  • public service boards
  • regional partnership boards
  • local authorities
  • health boards.
• Planning and commissioning for social value using the National Themes, Outcomes and Measures (TOMS) Framework and Can Do toolkits.
• Making it easier to use resources flexibly.,
• Investing in local and social businesses.
• Developing a shared vision based on location.
• Agreeing how statutory, third and private sector services can help get results.
• Encouraging partners to share information with each other.
• Choosing a pilot project to test new approaches, then capture and share the learning.

What to focus on

• Finding the ‘natural’ and ‘appointed’ leaders within the community
• Considering peer support as a way to introduce mentoring
• Setting clear, shared goals, and the steps you’ll take to achieve them
• Changing how you act when things are difficult so you can meet your goals, and working with everyone else to get through it
• Designing or finding the help you’ll need to help you reach your goals.
• Looking at the rules:
  • are they the right ones?
  • how are they interpreted and applied?
  • are they being used in the spirit of the policy framework, especially the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014?
• Helping all types of community organisations in a leadership role to talk to decision-makers, and offering to help
• Sharing your journey with others so they benefit from what you learned along the way.

What to focus on

• How the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 are being applied in your community: is it in the spirit of the acts?
• Checking if your actions follow your vision
• Thinking whether commissioning, procurement and funding can be changed to provide more long-term stability to service providers
• Introducing collaborative bid processes to encourage more people to work in partnerships and make it easier to get funding
• Working with service providers before tendering for services so that you work to the same vision and goals
• Putting systems in place to record discussions and evidence that come from place-based conversations, for example, stakeholder engagement
• Simplifying monitoring and evaluation processes so that it doesn’t hold up the work.

What to focus on

• Making informal relationships into formal strategic alliances.
• Setting up productive relationships between local authorities and local town and community councillors. These should be based on positive leadership, trust, attitudes and skills.
• Getting rid of historical barriers to working together.
• Using the knowledge and skills of elected members and officers in place-based planning.
• Developing relationship-based compassionate leadership.
• Establishing place-based community teams.

What to focus on

• Making sure that you have good local leadership, trust and communication with new and existing providers throughout the commissioning cycle. This will help make sure that commissioning is truly flexible
• You should use qualitative methods, (such as personal stories that have been co-produced) to measure outcomes or value for money. This will help you to measure how effective the investment in community resourcefulness has been
• Learning lessons from community challenges in hard-to-reach and rural areas, which have needed more problem-solving.
• Local, regional and national policy-makers should continue to focus on what good policy should do. This will make sure that communities get the best help to grow, innovate and succeed.

What to focus on

• Valuing and building on people’s strengths
• Helping networks to talk to each other
• Finding out what matters for the people involved
• Building relationships with trust and shared power
• Helping people to make change.

What to focus on

• Setting your principles and values from the beginning. This is more important than setting your outcomes. Working together to achieve these outcomes will make them easier
• Investing time and resource into building relationships
• Developing a shared approach to measuring meaningful impact
• Working out if third sector organisations could share staff, such as back office and fundraising staff.

What to focus on

• Developing the right structures, including funding processes, to make sure community and voluntary organisations can continue to work in the future
• Advising, helping and encouraging organisations to get different types of funding so they can stay flexible and strong.
  • More funding can help organisations make more of a difference. You should emphasise the social value of investment
• Finding ways for organisations to work on bids and tenders together. For example, organisations could look at how they can share fundraising staff
• Making it easier for organisations to apply and report how they use resources, and make it easier for organisations to receive long-term core funding. It can be difficult and expensive to innovate for every grant application.

What to focus on

• Setting your principles and values from the beginning. This is more important than setting your outcomes. Working together to achieve these outcomes will make them easier.
• Investing time and resource into building relationships
• Developing a shared approach to measuring meaningful impact
• Working out if third sector organisations could share staff, such as back office and fundraising staff.

What to focus on

• Investing in regeneration that prioritises places and people who need it most
• Supporting investment in housing and the wider infrastructure, including community development
• Designing procurement strategies with communities that benefits the community and uses local investment to build wealth.
• Let registered social landlords be flexible so they can have the best impact on their local communities by helping them to:
  • build capacity and skills
  • develop contractual and governance processes
  • decide on their roles. For example: are they funding, are they taking the lead or are they; entering into a partnership with other organisations?
• Registering social landlords, and working together to the same vision and strategy, with a clear description of how this will help planning for the area
• Thinking about developing community hubs or clusters with partners including local authorities, voluntary and community organisations to help make sure activities are relevant to the local situation and build the partner organisations’ capacity.

What to focus on

• Developing a shared understanding of what prevention is and supporting it
• Recognising the value and contribution of:
  • informal neighbourliness that has taken on caring and companionship roles
  • community support and activity groups
  • green spaces
  • other community assets.
• Understanding that the community knows what’s best for it
• Gathering evidence and research over time to measure the impact of prevention
• Taking a community-centred approach to health and well-being by:
  • developing an approach that works across the sector
  • making sure communities are involved in designing and running services
  • mapping and using local assets
  • commissioning in ways that give everyone access to activities that support well-being
  • measuring outcomes that matter to communities
  • emphasising prevention activities in strategic planning and commissioning.

What to focus on

• Spending some time getting to know the communities you’d like to work with
• Exploring the local history, background and politics
• Finding out what’s going on, and if there are community groups or organisations running projects
• Asking a local organisation to give you a community induction, or just go for a walk around
• Talking to local people, asking them what works, what doesn’t work, what could be improved
• Looking at data about the community
• Finding case studies or stories to learn more about the community
• Find out about local assets within the community.

What to focus on

• Working with local businesses that contribute to the foundational economy. They’re an important partner, and can provide:
  • provide essential local services
  • offer jobs
  • can provide community-wide leadership.
• Community interest companies (CICs) and micro-businesses can work at a very local level to develop and improve community resilience. Bigger companies can’t always be as flexible
• When organisations outsource work, they should use the TOMs (themes, outcomes, measures) procurement process to support social value and community resourcefulness.

What to focus on

• Planning how to get more local people involved in community action and planning, design and running local services
• Finding which specific challenges you have. Think about what actions, skills and resources you need for each challenge, including:
  • what you want or need from community action
  • which kind of people you need to engage with
  • where they are
  • how many people you need
  • when's a good time to engage with people?
  • how should you approach people who may get involved?
  • who's going to find people and get them involved?
  • what happens if you get a yes, a maybe, or a no?
  • which things might stop you succeeding? How will you get around them?

• Find and take away barriers, to make it easy for people to access community activities
• Working with the main stakeholders to decide on a vision and priorities.
  • You should agree how you’ll do this, and make sure partners know what their role will be.

• Explaining how digital communication platforms can help, and their limitations:
  • find any features of your digital platform that aren’t accessible or easy for your audience to use, and how you’ll address these
  • are there print, radio or television formats of important news and information?

• Finding volunteering in the community and making opportunities for it to develop
• Find out:
  • what volunteering has done for the area?
  • how is volunteering resourced?
  • do they need more resources?
• Understanding the different people in your community and finding out if resources and services meet everyone’s needs.
  • For example: Welsh language, culture, and different age groups.

• Finding ways to record and learn from good work happening at community level.

What to focus on

Primary care clusters should:

• carry on building and developing working relationships with communities
• find out how community-led action has helped people, communities, and public services before and after Covid-19
• learn from each other and the strategic programme for primary care. For example, the Accelerated Cluster Development programme could help to make this happen quickly and consistently across Wales
• find what works at a local level when you use or develop health and social care models
• collect information about communities and use it to make primary care clusters, health boards’ and regional partnership boards’ plans better
• find evidence of local social and healthcare models and find what works.

What to focus on

• Understanding how much the community wants something
• The local context
• Meeting a community’s needs
• Mapping assets
• Making time to build relationships
• Positive community mindset
• Supporting community leadership.

Support decision-making with:

• toolkits
• guides
• helpful people.