Enabling City – approach and book

Here is a blurb about the Enabling City book (that is online a free to access) that caught our attention:

“At its simplest, Enabling City is a new way of thinking about communities and change. Guided by principles such as collaboration, innovation and participation, the pioneering initiatives featured in Enabling City attest to the power of community in stimulating the kind of innovative thinking needed to tackle complex issues ranging from participatory citizenship to urban livability.”

Check out the website and see Creative Commons shared book here.

Collaboration Readiness: Why it matters, how to build it, and where to start

Collaborate has been developing projects to understand the linkages between creative thinking, systemic culture change and front-end delivery, and the role that cross-sector collaboration can play in supporting them. In October 2015 they published a report outlining a lot of their thinking and findings. Key to this was:

“Only 13% of UK citizens surveyed by Ipsos MORI for Collaborate feel a stake in shaping the public services they receive.  The report includes more brand new citizen survey data that shows the need for much greater cross-agency collaboration at a local and national level.”

This connected with us around how we feel a wide range of people should be co-creators and designers of services, right from the very start, and we want to insert this approach into the heart of our project.

Lecture on place-based reform

This lecture was delivered by Professor Frank Oberklaid who is sharing his experiences in Australia as Director for the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne. His work is focused on the application of science to policies on children’s health and development, directed towards influencing the way in which communities and public systems can collaborate to produce better child outcomes.

It’s quite a complex presentation but there is a slideshow as well that breaks down some issues connecting communities and services.