Stage 2 submission - October 2021

In 4 years time, success looks like:

An established, ongoing community conversation continually feeding into strategic decision-making. Quality support for immediate community action, which is further enhanced as part of strategic decision-making and conversations. A growing movement to reduce social isolation and create a city of belonging. Identifiable decisions influenced by the outputs from community conversations. Developing collaboration between Plymouth City Council, the NHS, and other Local Care Partnership partners, including the VCSE, impacting governance and decision-making processes.

The overriding reflection on the last 6 months is that we are just warming up! We started with a clear process, stepping from community conversation and insight into action, but it was untested. We started with a clear set of principles, and as such, the detail of the process was emergent. As a result, we did not identify where in the system we would build specific collaborative action because we had not yet listened to the community conversations, nor did we have a ‘product’ through which to engage other partners. We have needed courage and confidence in the principles as the delivery has had to adapt and emerge from the work. This tension sits at the heart of Human Learning Systems. Being human-centered and relationship-based, as well as testing new approaches, means the products are formed from the context, not a predictable plan.

We now have a robust community conversation ‘product’ we can promote. We have the start of conversations coming through, and we have an initial fuzzy cognitive map that we can now use to demonstrate how this will translate into system-level conversations as well as funding activities. None of this was available at the start and has been collaboratively developed through the core partnership. A lack of a ‘product’ did impact engagement.

This leads to the next reflection – it has been difficult building a partnership without core partners being funded to engage. The funding via Barrow Cadbury has met some of this challenge, but not all. Another environmental aspect of this challenge is the sheer weight of numbers of organisations that are connected into and dealing with social isolation and loneliness directly or indirectly. To build a partnership out of larger delivery organisations would skew the work towards the interests of larger organisations, whilst much work is done by very small grassroots groups. Thus, in line with original intentions, the sense of building a movement is more apt in this situation. But this takes much more time to slowly develop.

Capacity is a recurring theme. The last 6 months have obviously still been impacted by the pandemic, and in Plymouth, cases were still increasing in September, with Plymouth University Hospital significantly struggling. Latterly, the Keyham tragedy further stretched already thin resources. At the city level, this has meant even greater pressure on system leaders’ time and therefore capacity to engage. A by-product of the hospital’s situation is an even greater pressure to react immediately, and preventative measures continue to feel like an outsider to the mainstream discussion. This is counteracted by strong leadership from the City Council, particularly the Director of Public Health and Strategic Director of People.