Working better together in neighbourhoods

Stage three: sustaining neighbourhood working

Invest in the local workforce alongside volunteering roles, as neighbourhood working continues to grow and develop.
Recognise that an overreliance on volunteers or the goodwill of individuals can put the sustainability of neighbourhood working at risk. Consider how best to invest in building up community capacity and resilience, working around existing shared values and goals.
Continue to monitor, report and evaluate activities at the neighbourhood level, sharing this learning with partners both within and outside of the local neighbourhood, building credibility and sustainability. Recognise that this is an opportunity not just to reflect existing ways of measuring success but to understand impact from the community perspective too.

For real lasting change to take place, leaders of that change must be prepared to change themselves and work with themselves as instruments of change in action. This means investing time to examine their own beliefs, strategies, behaviours and what is needed to support the next stage of development.
Consider developing communities of practice to support ongoing dialogue, facilitate shared learning, enable joint problem-solving and the identification of further opportunities.
Work with communities to continue to deepen understanding of assets and needs within neighbourhoods and how this can be reflected in better place and system working.
Success in addressing initial challenges will only be sustained if there is a shared commitment to going beyond addressing individual issues in specific localities to ensuring that relationships and values continue to be strengthened in each interaction between statutory partners, professionals and communities. This will require ongoing investment in statutory and VCSE-based teams.
Consider how knowledge, resources and people can be enabled to ‘flow’ within systems in the context of evolving needs, developing policies and processes to support enhanced capacity, skills and shared learning across neighbourhoods and priorities.