Barnet Council's Vision for the Future.

In the Fall of 2022, myself and Collaborate colleagues supported Barnet Council to develop a shared purpose across the organisation orienting towards a more community focused and outcomes approach. The aim was to help identify new behaviours and mindsets among staff to be more collaborative, outward-looking and empowering of residents.

My role as project manager involved co-designing a highly adaptive process to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the London Borough of Barnet through interviews, focus groups, meetings and workshops, including statutory partners, Councillors, residents, VCFS, the business sector, and educational institutions. The engagement process and partner voices fed into our diagnostic which informed our recommendations to the Council which fed into their new 5-year strategy. 

During our large-scale engagement we saw a mix of feelings. On one hand there was energy, experience and commitment from many of the staff and residents to implement meaningful plans in the Borough. On the other hand, there had been a history of poor communication, a lack of engagement, especially with marginalised communities and inefficient spending of public funds that created a lot of distrust, especially with residents. 

As ‘outsiders’, we attempted to bring a new perspective to help move things forward and rebuild much of that trust which was lost; we focused on building relationships so that people trusted us to hold space for hard conversations, surfacing the challenges that were holding back the group. We asked what was meaningful to the people of Barnet, what resources they needed to succeed, and who they needed to work with to make their dreams a reality. 

We listened to what was said, and came back as a team to develop workable solutions and recommendations needed for embedding collaboration into the Council’s strategy through careful brokerage that respected the different and occasionally conflicting viewpoints across the different groups. Crucially, ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders throughout the process allowed us to test and refine our ideas, setting out our reasoning and ensuring that the recommendations in our final report had widespread acceptance. 

The process of our work in the borough itself was a catalyst. It deepened relationships and understanding between different actors, demonstrating that different ways of joining together were possible.