Stage two: nurturing neighbourhood working

Neighbourhood

• Continue to develop a shared understanding of the drivers and priorities of communities and services operating within identified neighbourhoods. 
• Build on trust and understanding, including through sharing progress against shared goals and understanding the roles that each partner is playing, as well as working together to strengthen application of shared values to daily practice and overcome remaining barriers to change.
• Continue to adapt and evolve, being unafraid of letting go of things that are not working to create space for new ideas to emerge.      This includes understanding how widening the initial partnership and community empowerment creates additional opportunities to broaden and deepen impact. 
• Systemise governance and oversight structures that involve people from across the local system to support a sense of shared ownership and accountability for the success and ongoing sustainability of neighbourhood working initiatives.
• Understand implications for voluntary and community sector capacity as developments scale, including the need to provide additional resources and capacity to balance existing and new demands.

System and place

• Make connections between the people leading change and support to capture and learn from this, for example local universities and Health Innovation Networks. 
• Understand opportunities to invest in individuals within communities to equip people with the skills and capabilities to help plan, develop and evaluate the impact of joint working with statutory partners. Recognise that there will be an equal if not greater need to support professionals to work differently with local communities in this context.
• Continue to share best practice and evidenced approaches from elsewhere, Including building on lessons from other sectors in strengthening community engagement, providing coaching and mentoring, and enabling peer support.
• Identify funding and support to build relationships and sustain local trust. From a statutory perspective, this could include funding through intermediary organisations or alliance contracting to enable shared management of activity and risk. Creating space and flexibility within existing funding arrangements will be critical to ensure that local neighbourhood partnerships can respond to and invest in local assets and needs. 
• Recognise that this is a major cultural change, requiring support and investment in areas such as change management, organisational development, relationship and community development, volunteering and project management.
• Take action to ensure neighbourhoods have, can access, and make effective us of community infrastructure. Having a physical place to be is a key enabler of joint neighbourhood working. Equally this will need new relationships between organisations and communities to create an environment to foster change.
• Ensure effective support. Neighbourhood partnerships often do not have the resources to be able to easily scale and may need help with a range of support functions including recruitment, DBS checks, sharing standard policies (such as safeguarding) governance processes and structures. Statutory partners can help support communities through this if they can engage at the right time and in the right way.