Executive summary

Britain’s social fabric is frayed. But in communities across the country, people are hard at the work of repair. For years, many thousands of people have been working to revitalise the capacity of communities and foster a healthier and more active civic sphere.

In recent years, there have been a growing number of programmatic efforts to support this work – pots of funding for one initiative or another. But less attention has been paid to the practitioners who do this work; to the skills, methods, and dispositions they are applying; and to the institutions, training, and communities that help people to do this work.

For the past six months, Kinship Works has been working with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We set out to map the disciplines of civic renewal and their supporting professional architectures. Our goal was to treat civic renewal with the same respect we show to mature professions, from midwifery to brain surgery, while being mindful of the risks of codifying this work, losing the very qualities that make this work so powerful. We are grateful for JRF’s support for this work. The recommendations are our own.

The problem

The disciplines we describe are not short of skilled practitioners, but these practitioners too often have to go it alone. They often lack a shared account of what the work is, somewhere to learn it, colleagues to share skills with, and names and evidence that mean something to senior leaders and funders. Much of the support for civic disciplines that does exist has been built piecemeal by small organisations, often with significant duplication.

This has consequences. Practitioners often arrive at the work of civic renewal sideways and learn it without support. Work that is not understood as skilled is not funded as skilled: it is bundled in with other duties and is the first to be cut when budgets are tight. In government, one symptom of this lack of appreciation for civic skills is the imbalance between capital and revenue; it is now much easier to fund the renovation of a community space than it is to pay for the skills that will help that space to thrive.

Despite all this, we are also alert to the risks of treating civic renewal as just another set of professions. Mapping a field can flatten it, and describing discipline can slip into prescription and bureaucratisation. Some of the work we describe in this report would be damaged by being codified, and some practitioners want nothing that looks like a traditional profession. We have kept this tension in mind as we moved through the work to recommendations.

A typology of disciplines

We have identified six broad categories of work, comprising fifteen disciplines. We do not see these as rigid categories, but as something more like recurring patterns. They are:

1. Connecting and brokering – this covers community and peer connectors, local area and patch-based coordinators, and civic space-makers and space-holders

2. Mediating – this covers community stewards, and peace-builders and bridge-builders

3. Empowering – this covers community organisers, and community power-builders and collective advocates

4. Seeing and reflecting – this covers lived-experience and peer researchers, and cultural, creative and heritage practitioners

5. Reforming and building – this covers civic institution-builders and systemic imaginers, and community and social entrepreneurs.

A sixth category, Creating the conditions, comprises work that is more enabling. It tends to sit in public institutions, looking outward. In this category we include institutional wranglers and system connectors, relational practitioners in public services, civic and place leaders, and infrastructure rewirers. If the other disciplines we describe engage directly in the work of civic repair and renewal, these disciplines are more about making the work possible.

Cutting across these disciplines we also identify five practices that show up in many disciplines. These are: restorative and healing practice, deep listening, facilitation and convening, participatory methods and co-design, and community research and inquiry.

Finally, we describe a civic ethic. This is a disposition we found running through almost all of the best civic work. It contrasts with the bureaucratic mentality that currently dominates government. It includes: seeing the whole person, as opposed to a single problem or category; starting with strengths, not deficits; seeing relationships as the work rather than an afterthought; being grounded in place; centring agency; and being driven by purpose and moral values, and comfortable with blurring personal and professional boundaries.

We hold all of these definitions lightly and offer them for discussion and improvement.

Mapping support

For each of the fifteen disciplines we asked: how well is this work supported, and how mature is the infrastructure around it? We have mapped five dimensions of support: codification, institutions, learning and training, communities of practice, and academic underpinnings. We rate each on a five-point scale from “missing” to “fully mature”. A low score is not always a negative; in some cases, disciplines told us they do not want the formalisation and restriction of some of the forms of support such as formal qualifications. However, gaps such as a complete lack of available training, or no communities of practice do make it harder for practitioners to develop, and disciplines to flourish.

We find significant variation. Some civic disciplines have dense support built up over decades; others have almost none. Community organisers and community and social entrepreneurs have the most mature support architecture, while community stewards and institutional wranglers have the least well developed. There is also significant variation within disciplines: for example, peer research is well supported in mental health but largely absent from criminal justice or asylum, while peer connectors are well-supported inside the NHS but less so outside it. Support tends to follow funding, and stop where the money runs out. When we compare the different dimensions of support, we find that communities of practice are the strongest dimension, while codification and training are the weakest.

Recommendations

The work of civic renewal merits better support. However, this does not necessarily mean attempting to professionalise these disciplines, assuming they should follow the paths of more traditional careers. We believe it would be possible to more deliberately support this work without running this risk. One key principle is that the locus of civic renewal should remain in the civic sphere, while the state supports the work from a distance, for example with funding, convening, and by seeding institutions.

The civic sector should do the work needed to support these disciplines – developing role profiles, syllabuses, training courses, evaluation frameworks, and best practice case studies. It should do so, however, in a less piecemeal fashion, and more on the model of a commons. Relevant materials should be openly accessible and collectively governed. Government, major foundations, and keystone civic bodies should support this work by backing a long-term funding and institutional settlement.

At the core of this settlement we propose the foundation of a network of Civic Colleges. These would be sites of civic power and learning, rooted in places, sitting independently in the civic sphere. They would be places for people to go to acquire and refine the disciplines we describe in this report, not least by sharing skills with each other.

We believe Civic Colleges would be most powerful if funded by an endowment model, likely with a blend of public and foundation and other philanthropic investment, potentially with statutory backing. Many or all of the Civic Colleges would grow from existing institutions and initiatives. For their design and spirit, we would look to historical institutions, such as settlement houses and mechanics’ institutes, and the example of folk high schools in Denmark.

Beneath this headline proposal, we also recommend six strands of work:

• Funding centres of excellence for emerging disciplines

• Patient multi-year funding for convenings and peer networks

• A route to formal recognition for disciplines that want it

• Investment in pathways into disciplines, including apprenticeships and portable progression frameworks that span similar disciplines

• An effort to build the relevant enabling capacities in the public sector, in local government and frontline public services as much as in Whitehall

• Shared administrative infrastructure to free practitioners from operational work