Introduction

The phrase ‘Britain is broken’ has become so over-used that it rolls off the tongue with barely a thought. It means many things but chief among them is a sense that our social fabric is frayed – that community capacity and infrastructure have been dangerously depleted, and that as a society we are coming apart at the seams.

There is now a recognition not just that these trends must be reversed with urgency, but that this effort is already well underway. Across Britain people are working – and have been for years – to revitalise the capacity of communities and to foster a healthier and more vibrant civic sphere. Within these efforts, there is rightly a focus on ‘doubly disadvantaged’ places that exhibit material deprivation and a hollowed out civic life. If Britain is broken, the work of repair is well underway.

As the work of civic renewal has matured, there has been lots of talk about its programmatic aspects: projects like Big Local (a National Lottery Community Fund programme which invested £217m across 150 areas); government initiatives like Pride in Place; and the many local examples of communities taking ownership of assets, or improving health and wellbeing, or creating new opportunities for young people.

In this report we look at civic renewal through a different lens: the disciplines that make up the field. To date, this has been considered mostly in a piecemeal fashion, such as via research into a particular profession or practice. As a consequence, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the workforce needed to enact civic renewal, and of the requisite skills and mentalities. We also don’t have full sight of the support there is available today for these disciplines – from training, to practitioner communities, to role profiles and career pathways – or of the gaps in this support. This hinders those who want to support civic renewal, from philanthropic foundations to government.

In this project, we set out to map the disciplines of civic renewal, treating them with the same respect we would show to a mature profession, like teaching or midwifery. We have developed a typology, which we offer here for discussion. We have also mapped the supporting architecture around the disciplines we identified along five dimensions: codification, supporting institutions, learning and training, communities and meetups, and academic underpinnings. Finally, we make recommendations for how the disciplines of civic renewal could be better supported. We offer these in the same spirit as the typology – as starting points for discussion.

What felt clear, embarking on this work, is that the disciplines of civic renewal deserve to be valued more highly. At the same time, we are mindful of the risks of unnecessarily professionalising this work, and in doing so bureaucratising it. In the following section we offer a definition of the problem we are trying to solve, and the risks inherent to doing so.

The problem

The disciplines we describe in this report are often not short of enthusiastic practitioners. But what they very often lack is the kind of financial and institutional support that typically accompanies mature professions. This could be anything from a shared account of what the work is, somewhere to learn it, colleagues doing the same job who can be sought out to share skills with, and an academic evidence-base to explain the work’s value to senior stakeholders and funders.

One consequence of this lack of definition, recognition, and support, is extensive duplication. Small organisations, working in isolation and with little money, write their own role profiles, design their own training, and build their own ways of showing that the work is worth funding. Very little of this work is then shared across the sector. It sits on hard drives, or in reports to funders, or in the head of the person who developed it.

There is also a cost for practitioners themselves. Very few of the practitioners we spoke to had set out to do the job they now do. They arrived at it sideways – through a volunteering role, or a job in a related service, or because something needed doing and nobody else was doing it. They learned the work as they went along, often without a supervisor who had done similar things before, and often without recognising that they were developing valuable skills. Several practitioners described a sense of isolation. People said they lacked colleagues to compare notes with, or a supervisor to discuss a difficult case with, or even an account of the work that makes sense to the people around them.

Underneath all this sits a question of value and standing. Many people we interviewed felt that government and other actors did not recognise the value of community organisations and the work they do, and that public institutions often behave in ways that actively hinder the work.

Community work has a long history of being patronised with a wave of the hand: this is charity, or volunteering, or a hero story. It is treated as optional – nice when we can afford it – while other work, done by nurses and teachers, is essential.

The most common concerns we heard were:

• Investment in community organisations being regarded as risky: “they don’t trust us with money”. People drew attention to the tendency to trust large professional services organisations over community workers, who “are in it because we live here and breathe here”.

• A combination of silos and high staff turnover in government, which leaves community organisations having to speak to different parts of the same public authority multiple times, repeatedly building new relationships when trusted contacts move on.

• Occasional hostility, when government bodies such as local authorities see community organisations as stepping on their turf, or become perturbed by unconventional methods and approaches. In contrast, we also heard about excellent examples that show what is possible when public authorities and civic organisations work together and value each other’s contributions.

• Community organisations struggling to show value through traditional performance reporting and funding control mechanisms, which often insist on narrow measures of deliverables.

This undervaluing also shows up in budgets. Civic work is often bundled in with other duties, given to whoever has capacity, and cut first when budgets are tight. The community manager ends up also fixing the light bulbs and issuing the invoices. The problem is not just a lack of funding, but continual uncertainty. It is common for community and civic organisations to have to put staff at risk on an annual basis while they wait for funding to be approved, or the latest contract or grant agreement to be signed. The organisation may have existed for decades, but staff are not afforded the security of knowing from one year to the next whether they will remain employed.

Finally, the undervaluing of civic disciplines plays out in an over-emphasis on capital funding, relative to revenue funding. Government finds it easier to fund buildings than the people needed to run them. This is partly because the work of civic renewal is less legible than the buildings it takes place within. The result is a stock of civic assets that are under-used because the disciplines that would activate these spaces have no reliable way of being paid for. For all these reasons, we think it worthwhile better defining, recognising, and supporting the disciplines of civic renewal.

The risks of professionalisation

We recognise that there are downsides to formalisation, for example by encouraging civic work in the direction of defined professions and regulated qualifications. Professionalisation is not the only way to value work, or to support it better, and it will not be right for many of the disciplines we name in this report. In the course of the work, we heard four particular risks to keep in mind as we try to bring more definition to the work of civic renewal.

The first is that categorising disciplines forces intrinsically human and relational work into bureaucratic boxes, losing the holistic instincts that make it powerful. A community project leader is more approachable than a Job Centre adviser, or a doctor, partly because they are seen as a human first, as opposed to being a specialised ‘professional’. Civic work is able to range across the siloes of bureaucratic or clinical professions. By categorising the work, we could risk making it more legible, but less impactful.

Second, there is a risk that formalising this work makes it less adaptable. Often, the people who do civic work on the ground find themselves spanning a huge range of skills and activities: chairing a meeting, deescalating a fight, navigating local services. People said they respond to new challenges every day on intuition, with little time to think and intellectualise. There are downsides to this, but also upsides. Some argued that community work consists of precisely this ability to adapt. Others said the work is less about skills and practices, and more about applying a certain disposition in a wide range of situations – they talked about their work as a vocation, not a profession. For people who felt this way, the idea of defining disciplines came a distant second to the need for more funding.

Third, there is a risk that description turns into prescription. This is a particular risk if civic work becomes codified into syllabuses and training. Civic work adds value in part because it embodies the notion of metis described by James C Scott: practical intelligence learned by people working in a local context. We should not assume that learning requires formal training; it might just as well be achieved by swapping tacit knowledge among practitioners.

Fourth, professionalisation risks creating an industry of certificates and gatekeepers, inhibiting the real work. For many types of civic work – e.g. peer researchers – it is vital that the work remains readily accessible, and does not become hidden behind institutions.

In general, these concerns have leaned us towards certain ways of recognising and supporting the work of civic renewal – for example, communities of practice, as opposed to more formal accredited qualifications. We also note that each of the disciplines we identify are different; some lend themselves more to professionalisation than others.

How to read this report

This report draws on a programme of interviews and visits carried out over the course of 2026. We spoke to practitioners working across the disciplines we describe, along with funders, academics, and people working in institutions that support this work. Alongside the interviews we visited places where civic renewal is under way, spending time with practitioners where they work. Quotations are unattributed to respect the privacy of practitioners. The emerging typology was tested in a workshop and the mapping of support was assembled through desk research and tested with practitioners in the relevant fields.

The report is set out in three parts.

Part 1 lays the conceptual groundwork. Anyone trying to make sense of civic work runs quickly into questions of definition – what counts as a discipline, how does this differ from a practice, where does the work sit in relation to the state, and how does this all relate to longer-standing traditions, like community development? In the first section of the report we share reflections on these questions.

Part 2 presents the emerging typology and our assessments of the maturity of current support. We present a typology with three sections: 15 disciplines grouped into six categories; a series of cross-cutting practices that run across many disciplines; and a civic ethic, a disposition and moral code that we notice runs through almost all civic work. The typology is not intended as a set of rigid categories, but as a series of common patterns. We hope it is helpful for people seeking to understand this work, and for practitioners to contextualise their work and see the wider movement they are part of.

For each discipline we evaluate the maturity of the supporting architecture. We do this across five dimensions: codification, institutions, learning and training, communities of practice, and academic underpinnings. The intent is to show where support is already mature and where it is threadbare. The idea of rating maturity raises complicated questions, which we also address in this section. Nonetheless, we hope these assessments are helpful for funders and policymakers who want to support this work.

Part 3 shares our recommendations. We argue that the locus of civic renewal must sit in the civic sphere; the state’s job is to create the conditions in which this work can thrive – through infrastructure, funding, convening, and by seeding institutions. We make recommendations on these fronts, at the heart of which is the idea of supporting the creation of a network of Civic Colleges: centres of power and learning, existing in the civic sphere. These important institutions could be endowed via combined investments from foundations, high-net worth donors, and government.

Scope

We have focused on the most direct efforts at civic and community-led renewal, emphasising what it takes to do this work in doubly disadvantaged places. We therefore look mainly at work that sits outside the state, in the civic sphere, as opposed to work done by public servants. For more on the public sector, see our wider initiative at Kinship Works to map communities of public service reformers.¹

We are also concerned with the ecosystem in which this work takes place, because it does not happen in a vacuum. We have therefore also looked at the most relevant roles that sit in the state and look outward (e.g. a relational social worker, a civic-minded school leader, a local authority Chief Executive who sees their work as stewardship of a place). Of course, these boundaries are blurred; many people who work in the civic sphere are themselves funded by government.