Participatory approaches and the future of philanthropy and public services

The UK is facing a moment. After 14 years, a new government is in place and ready to try and rebuild Britain. There is so much to do, whether it’s creating safe and accessible spaces within healthcare and education, or growing the economy and achieving net zero. Key to achieving all this, is how we involve people most impacted by these issues and centre them at the heart of this work.

A key tool to help do that, and one that TSIP has been working extensively with over the last 6-7 years, is participatory approaches: The idea of involving citizens, users, and leaders with lived experience in the design, development, and delivery of services, programmes, decisions, policy, funding allocation and more. 

Across the World, we’re seeing various directions of travel - some are taking autocratic routes, some moving towards more nationalist models, and we can see populist approaches emerging in places too. 

Here in the UK, there are plenty of examples of participatory work including Islington Giving, Camden Giving, and Barking and Dagenham Giving with their participatory city work. Wigan Council also took their own approach to it a few years back, and there’s the amazing work of Immy Kaur in Birmingham with Civic Square, The National Lottery Big Local work, and Renaisi’s Local Access Partnership work. And naturally, we'd like to highlight TSIP’s own work in Southwark with The Giving Lab.

The Giving Lab is an innovative funding model ecosystem where communities have reimagined grantmaking led by and for communities. Codesigned with the local community and set up in partnership with our funders Impact on Urban Health, and Wellcome Trust, the Giving Lab brings together people, organisations and businesses in Southwark to share, develop and fund ideas for improving community health. The result of its five-year pilot is a scalable funding model, which has naturally evolved to include community research and our vision is to transform into Community Knowledge Hubs - the possibilities and impacts of this kind of work are endless. 

In the UK we need our citizenry to maintain its belief in public good. One way to do this is by systematising participatory approaches. There are risks and benefits to doing this. The risks, which need to be considered and mitigated, include: Participatory approaches can be time consuming and in turn be costly to implement. Another challenge is that this can turn into an imbalance of voices of those with lived experience over the voices of those with learnt experience. Participatory approaches are about collaboration, and allow us to unlock the views and inputs of participants in the design and development of a public good in a fair, equitable, and instrumental way. A perceived challenge that has proven to be untrue is that this can blur into slow decision by committee: Camden Giving and B&D Giving have shown that community panels can make decisions quickly and be responsive to changing needs, far quicker than trusts & foundations and councils. They were able to disseminate significant pots of money during COVID and respond in a way that councils simply couldn't. This point depends on the make up of the participatory panel itself.

Thus, combining lived experience and learnt experience can - and should - lead to the best possible designed public good. For example, let’s take the issue of improving our criminal justice system - a perennial and wicked problem which has endured, and which I’ve worked on both in the UK and USA. While there are those who see the system as one of punishment and deterrence, others call for it to be purely about rehabilitation and giving all perpetrators a second chance. In my view - both perspectives are valid, but the key is the need to design actions, improvements and new models that bring together all those who see or have seen the system from the angles of its respective existence. This means yes, let’s get the view of ex-offenders and those who know the system first-hand and get their input into design, and let’s combine that with the insights of professionals, from judges and prison staff through to police and probation officers and more. 

There are practical steps to doing this work, such as the need to first research and understand the issue area from multiple lenses, and then pull together the right stakeholders to co-design and co-produce the approach. Then there is a phase of development and delivery to stand up and test the work. This should be followed by funding and delivering the work, closing out with transition. Throughout the work there should be learning and evaluation. 

There are also guiding principles to how this work should be done, which include recognising the cultural relevance of all involved and not seeing mass assimilation to one way of thinking. Then there is the need to avoid extraction-like approaches. Other principles include making space for leadership, compensating expertise and encouraging ownership. The goal should always be to work towards a legacy. 

This work can transform how we do things. What it also needs is a simple and easy-to-use  technical solution. A platform enabled and facilitated by the government could make this a fun, interactive and scalable solution. 

I hope we can systematise and grow this work across the UK and beyond.

Stephen Bediako OBE