Rethinking citizen engagement
The challenge
Our local, national and international institutions face some huge challenges. Many of these are challenges which can only truly be met with the ideas, energy and support of citizens – yet too much public engagement work continues to feel transactional, performative or just an afterthought. We need more people across public services to really understand the power of good engagement, how to make it impactful and how to recognise the role it can play in strengthening not only our policy-making and practice, but our communities, organisations and wider systems.
How I can help
For 20 years, I’ve been helping organisations to listen to, work alongside and create change with their citizens. From workshops on local futures to climate assemblies to co-design processes, my work is about enabling people to play a more meaningful role in shaping the world around them – and supporting our local institutions to build their own capacity to commission and host better, more impactful engagement. So whether you want help to design a one-off engagement process or to completely rethink what engagement looks like in your organisation, get in touch.
Knowing where to start
More and more organisations understand the value of good engagement but don’t always know where, when and how to get started. There are lots of ways to engage people, depending on the circumstances, where you are in the process and where you (and other stakeholders) want to get to. I can help you make the right decisions early on.
Thoughtful design and expert facilitation
I can help you to design a process that gets the most out of those participating. I can also facilitate that process in a way that is engaging, inclusive and effective. I can then help you transpose findings into clear, impactful reports or to design follow-up workshops that build momentum with senior colleagues and partners.
Capacity building and organisational development
The best engagement is more than a one-off process – it’s part of a whole way of thinking about the value of citizen voices and how to integrate them into the way an organisation works. I can design and run training to build colleagues’ capacity around engagement, translating big ideas into practical tools and they can use.
Projects
I work directly with clients under the Public Sphere name; with fellow freelancers as part of the Better Decisions Together network; and via other organisations as an associate. Working with public participation charity Involve, for instance, I am currently leading the West Midlands Combined Authority’s Climate Panel and have recently been supporting the London Borough of Greenwich to produce a new Community Engagement Framework. Below are some examples of recent and current projects.
Shaping Wood Green
In late 2022 I designed and ran a series of 10 workshops with organisations and residents in Wood Green – my own neighbourhood – to help shape a new vision for the place. It was important to demonstrate that this was more than ‘just another engagement process’, with a direct connection between the messages coming through our workshops and the vision and action plans that followed. A year on there is real momentum behind the resulting work and local organisations involved are giving council colleagues positive feedback about its trajectory.
Tottenham Voices
Since Autumn 2023 I have been working with Regeneration Team colleagues in Haringey to design and facilitate a programme of thematic events that will underpin the first local vision for Tottenham in a decade.
Workshops took place in late 2023 and I’m currently supporting the team to turn the findings into a report. For this project we are actively exploring how to translate the initial workshops into something more long-lasting, creating space for ongoing collaborations across the community.
Budget Fortnight 2023
A London borough commissioned me and Sue Goss to work with the Chief Executive and a small design team to plan an intensive two-week programme of workshops in support of budget-setting for the next financial year. We facilitated a series of sessions on each day of Week 1, inviting c.150 senior managers from across the organisation to work together on developing radical but realistic proposals that could help the authority think more creatively about how to focus on its priorities against a backdrop of huge financial challenges.
Public Sphere 