Join LPIP Hub Place Fellow Helen O’Gara as she finishes her blog series ‘We Are Guests’, exploring the felt experience of the community development workforce.
This final blog brings knowledge mobilisation into focus and asks what policy creation and implementation should look like.
View the other blogs in the series.
What should it look like?
In the last blog in this series, ‘We Are Guests’, I’m going to explore the final sentences my interviewees created to sum up their ‘mission’. Throughout the interviews, they shared what they felt it could or should be like to interact with policies and policymakers, so I finish by reflecting on the hope and imagination there is within the community development workforce to work together on building places in more inclusive and trauma-informed ways.
At the end of each interview, I utilised a sentence structure from Victoria Ward (2017) on knowledge mobilisation to give me a framework that I could use to compare and highlight different approaches.
This simple sentence was able to boil down the motivations, the methods and the change that each practitioner desired.
The final sentence was;
I want to help… to mobilise… by…. in order to….
Their perspectives were very personal. We had talked a lot about their communities, a lot about how the system works, a lot about their journeys. This sentence helped us to clarify these discussions and find a personal ambition. For some, it was quite difficult. The framework words were not necessarily the ones they would choose for themselves, and I did allow a little leeway in that.
“I want to help citizens to mobilise their capabilities by strengthening the civic infrastructure in order to create dignity for everyone”
Who do my interviewees want to help? Their communities, their peers, anyone? Everyone?
“I want to help the residents of my community to get them to take responsibility for their lives by showing them that there is a different way in order to change the area for the next generation”
The mobilisation part was more varied. Some interviewees were focused on advocacy, some on direct change. The word ‘mobilise’ denotes some movement, some change in and of itself; what dial did they want to shift? For some it’s their community’s own health and life, their agency; for others it was voices, influence, raising up ideas, system change.
“I want to be involved with others to mobilise community voices. By ensuring equality of voices and real co-design in order to see community voices take centre stage in the governance of Pride of place initiative”
‘By’, the method: what is their way of working? What role have they found? Demonstration, being there, providing infrastructure, providing accountability, representing. They are a huge voice, and they represent a huge voice. Each had a different role in the system. They want to talk about their experiences; they desire to be heard. Their ‘by’ is important to policy makers. Are policy spaces open to their methods? Are they open to the role that community development takes?
“I want to help VCFSE organisations, particularly specialist organisation, and the communities they support to mobilise and amplify their voices and demonstrate their impact, by representing their experiences and evidence to government and funders, in order to see government and funders recognise their social and economic value and invest accordingly.”
‘In order to…’ their goal. Does it align with policy goals? Looking back to the definitions of policy that the interviewees shared in blog 4, it comes from values and intentions. This ‘in order to…’ section is crucial to align with policy makers or by working together policy makers and those implementing policy are potentially working away from each other, and nothing is created.
I began my blog series wondering how it felt to be a ‘bridge’? That is how they have been framed in the literature. However, the answer I started to receive through these interviews was that this was not always their identity. Yes, there were elements of code-switching and moving between communities and policy makers, but the desire and the ambition was that they wouldn’t need to bridge anything, that the power would shift closer to communities and there would be more say in the way things worked; they would bring people and policy makers into a big sea of decision-making together. Policy wouldn’t be something that was created elsewhere.
Less bridge, more boat.
“That’s how I believe we can drive change from the bottom up”
“People wanted to take more charge of what they could.”
“In order for the system to work, you need to involve the community that you’re going to serve. Involving in terms of co-producing the policies and understanding what’s the need”
“The old rules of the game are over. We’re in this terrible interregnum, a space where the old system is dying and new hasn’t been born yet. And it’s down to us to tell the stories of the change we want to see. We have to claim it back.”
“Policy often feels like a top-down response to fixing people on their behalf and I would argue largely incapacitating people from helping themselves. Whereas policymaking done effectively is done with people, and it’s developed in the space rooted in the community and informed by the evidence base”
“You’ve got to get people on board to make a policy happen.”
There are some very interesting theories and methods starting to be used in mainstream policy making, considering participation, emancipatory practice, and deep democracy. Many of which have been around for a very long time in community-based practice. Recent LPIP papers ‘Dialling Up Democracy’ and ‘The Outside In’ (Swift, 2026) explore many of these themes in more detail.
That ‘interregnum’ that one of my interviewees talked about feels like a very choppy sea to be in right now, but it’s clear from the interviewees that they are there and there are many others there for the long haul.
The risks are clear: the precarity and volatility of the infrastructure and the emotional burden, much of which is familiar to statutory authorities. The support and care needed in this process is vital, and trauma-informed ways of working are necessary to limit the damage of the process.
I find joy and hope in reading about projects such as the Civic Imaginary Partnerships Project from Glasgow University, The Imaginarium for Liverpool City Region, and radical processes finding new potential such as Legislative Theatre.
Whatever initiative, methodology or process we embark on next. The learning I hope we take from this series is that we are probably a guest on a different timeline, and we should honour and learn from the deep history of place and people as we work together for change.
“Let’s talk it out. Let’s talk that out. You and me?”
This blog was written by Helen O’Gara, LPIP Hub Place Fellow. Helen is a Public Health Principal.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.