Over 100 people from different walks of life gathered around a dance floor in Sheffield City Hall recently – not to learn ballroom steps, but instead to learn how to be partners in place-based working, in a joint event with organisers that included Locality, the national network for community-led organisations.
Locality writes:
The Power of Place was an attempt by five different organisations – Collaborate, Lankelly Chase, Locality, Local Trust, Power to Change – with similar ambitions to transform places but different approaches, to come together and see what we could all share and learn. It was not so much a conference as a conversation, where many of the constituent parts that make up place-based systems could share perspectives, challenge each other and build relationships.
The event itself was an act of collaboration, with different organisations learning to trust each other, to be flexible and adaptive, to keep dialogue open and to be willing to relinquish control. It enabled us to pool our different skills, networks and experience, to organise something that was much more than any of us could have done on our own. The huge range of participants at The Power of Place – from community activists to central government, from academics to the sports and physical activity sector – demonstrated the far reaching recognition of a need to work across traditional silos, and of the value that stepping outside your organisational comfort zone can add.
Making change happen in a place requires a spirit of curiosity, openness, enquiry, dialogue. The final session of the event modelled this by handing the floor over to attendees to host their own discussions on a range of different themes or questions they had been suggesting throughout the day. For example, people wanted to talk about: how do you make your processes sustainable? How do we diversify our sector? Does money kill informal grassroots activism? For conference organisers, empty space on an agenda can be a bit daunting – but having overcome initial reticence to step up and lead topics, attendees welcomed the opportunity to set their own agenda and to find peers to learn from and make new connections. They also didn’t shy away from the difficult or provocative questions, highlighting the extent to which place-based working is also about allowing space for challenge and conflict. This reflects the kind of approach that might be required to manage dialogue in a place: stepping back to allow ideas to step forward.
