Trust lies at the heart of all our work. This category features posts about relational practice, psychological safety, and how deep relationships shape collaboration and wellbeing in community and professional spaces alike.
One cause of Difficult Conversations
A key shift in moving towards more relational practice, referred to in threads running through many of these blog pieces, is building trust and a shared sense of psychological safety. One early way of...
Psychological safety and trust
Background In the winter of 2023-24, in my role as Learning Partner for the project, I interviewed 11 of the 18 ‘core team’ members of Belong in Plymouth. A common theme was psychological safety and ...
Relational ways of working
Building Trust, Connection, and Authentic Relationships As time is given to the understanding of the context and in the building of relationships, this starts to push us into a way of working that is...
The areas we can be certain about
There is a long legacy of work that the Healthy Communities Together programme builds on. This written and embodied knowledge and experience is held in all of us. We know it as individuals, as colleag...
Collaboration - A Summary
Collaboration: "a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of ...
Moving away from command and control
When working in collaboration, there is no command or control. The normal organisational structure is lacking. Each organisation and each individual is a sovereign body in their own right. Working on ...
Managing roles in uncertainty
The work to be done is mind-bendingly interconnected. We are highly interconnected as a society. To get to work, we rely on the world’s people and resources to get there before we have even started th...
Systems and practices
The technical work has followed the interpersonal simply because the available technical tools and standard practices are designed for another context (as described above). As we have discovered, rela...
Humility and curiosity
This has a number of different aspects to it. First, at a very human level, if members of a collaboration make assumptions that, because of an area of expertise or worse, positional power, they need t...
Belong in Plymouth @ Matters of the HeART
On May 18th, Belong in Plymouth hosted an event at Ocean Studios to emphasize the importance of listening. The event aimed to make participants feel heard, regardless of their roles or labels, and to ...
Building Cross-Sector Connections
Karen Pilkington said something that’s stuck with us: “Different parts of the system have different understandings of what it means to ‘speak with the community.’” It’s true—and it’s exactly why we’v...
Building Relational Work — Even When Messy
On 31 May 2023, Matt Bell dropped a message into our thread that captured the spirit of our journey: “Love this coming together. Just musing… and connecting.” We were juggling so many moving parts—st...