Moving to community at the centre – and the challenge to commissioning

Moving to community at the centre – and the challenge to commissioning https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_abcd-and-trauma-informed-neighbourhoods-activity-7463166494605205506-2_EO

Every time I read something from those committed to and immersed in community development, like this from Mick Ward and Anthony Morrow, I’m deeply inspired: people live in neighbourhoods and relationships, not org charts, so that’s where we should start.

(Then I get a little headspin – my work – in Sophia Parker‘s phrase – is very much dancing in the messy middle of translations-in-progress)

Public services mostly see ‘community’ as a bolt-on to ‘services’. ‘Nice-to-have’ (when budgets allow). If the NHS is genuinely moving into neighbourhood working, this matters enormously. The report points to a centre of gravity where institutions are less about processing people through systems, more about strengthening the conditions in which people can support one another, remain connected, retain agency. That’s a profound shift for commissioning.

Stephen Moss gets to the heart of it: connecting the ‘I’ of lived experience, the ‘us’ of community, and the institutional system around them. That doesn’t happen just ‘cause organisations decide to collaborate. You can’t restructure your way to trust, you certainly can’t procure your way to belonging; the difficult bit is power.

Ryan Cowley is right that this requires institutions to relinquish some control to the ‘I’ and the ‘us’. But most public systems are still built around vertical accountability, target compliance, auditability, and management of organisational risk. That creates an immune response to relational ways of working. Institutions often experience human judgement, local discretion, and emergent community action as threats not assets.

Which means the challenge is not simply ‘do more partnership working’. It’s redesigning the conditions around commissioning, governance, measurement, and authority so relational work can survive contact with the machinery of the state.

That’s a huge part of what we wrestle with at The Public Service Transformation Academy Commissioning Academy (sign up now for September start 😉 – and tried to ‘bridge’ in The Commissioning Compass (free, link below). Not just ‘how do we commission differently?’ but how commissioners create enough room to manoeuvre for relational and community approaches to emerge and endure. How to move from transactional procurement logic toward stewardship of place, capability, and trust over time.

In that messy middle, we mustn’t slip into ‘relational good, transactional bad’ – we need both: standardise when you can, personalise when you must.

The problem comes when complex human situations are forced through transactional architectures designed for predictability and throughput. That’s where failure demand, escalation, institutional exhaustion (moral injury, burnout) begin.

What interests me about this report is that if we can see neighbourhoods as the primary organising logic (not as delivery zones for services), then we have a very different cocncept of the state to play with – and perhaps a very different idea of citizenship too.

This post was reposting https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryan-cowley-9aa44b159_abcd-and-trauma-informed-neighbourhoods-activity-7462843551677206528-btlP

To fully use the Commissioning Compass for free, go to https://link.redquadrant.com/commissioningcompass

If you are interested in attending the autumn Commissioning Academy please email david.mason@publicservicetransformation.org (discounts available for groups)