Community ‘Institutions’ and the service/outcome divide

We’ve all been in them. They’re nice. Friendly. Warm. You can feel it when you walk in. Maybe it’s your child’s primary school, or the local library. A great community centre has it too. It probably has friendly and helpful reception staff, and the other people in there will invariably seem relaxed and happy. They might smile at you – even in London.

With apologies to Justice Potter Stewart, a great community institution is a bit like pornography. You know it when you see it.

But what does it do to be that? Some of the positives are about being good at what it does. It’s an excellent school or an excellent library. The management has a good relationship with the staff, sets a clear and exciting vision for the service and thinks creatively about its partnerships. The front line staff know their pupils or users well, and have brilliant relationships with them. The students get good results and the users have a positive and relevant experience. But the best institutions in a community seem to have something else too. They’re about more than just service excellence – even though excellence is what they strive for.

Some recent work we did in libraries with the Big Lotteryand the MLA suggests that another factor might be how well that institution works with and engages their community and local people. In the initialbaseline work that was commissioned to try and understand what a library that ‘did’ community engagement would look like, the line ‘busier and buzzier’ was used. I liked that, and it was possible to see during our fieldwork for the research we did. The libraries that had gone furthest with engaging their community did feel ‘busier and buzzier’, and that made them nice places to be in.

So in practice, what did community engagement mean? Our report found several things that mattered, but a lot of it was about understanding the community (and that’s the whole local and user community, not just the typical users) and actively going out of your way to get them into the building. Them being there and doing something – even if it had nothing to do with books – was a real positive, and it often led to them doing something else. So in Toxteth, Liverpool, the library worked with Refugee Action to run weekly walks around the area for newly arrived asylum seekers. This introduced people to their new area, and the tour also finished in the library. People tended to stay and use other services and engage in the service landscape and community positively. We found that every library that was part of our research sample had an increased usage as a result of their work – and that usage increase was much greater than the increase in book loans (explained by the fact that new groups wanted to use the library for non-traditional reasons).

Often there would be new staff or individuals that would help the libraries change their approach to become more outward facing and engaging with the local community. It would work better in some places than others. Many places found it hard – how do you engage people in service design and delivery over a sustained period of time? We found that the biggest changes seemed to be around attitude and power. The killer line that one library manager used to describe the change from service led to community led was: “It’s not our library anymore, it’s theirs”. Those that embraced this change seem to be very successful – and on top of that we found that positive, stable involvement in the services was creating further impacts.

We were seeing health and wellbeing outcomes, learning and skills outcomes and community outcomes that were seen as qualitatively and quantitatively different by stakeholders and users as a result of that involvement. One project in Sandwell, Make Friends With a Book, was seen by users, the PCT and the local MIND has having incredibly positive impacts on the mental health and happiness of the participants. It was creating and sustaining bonds between individuals, and it was creating opportunities for people to talk openly in a relaxed setting. We used an SROI analysis for that project, and found a large range of outcomes and value that the project was creating for the users. People also talked about how their involvement in the library felt like they were giving back to the community as well as the service. They saw great value in the added extras that libraries were delivering as a result of the community engagement approach. Involving people in the running and activity of the library, therefore, meant for a better library service – but it also delivered a range of outcomes that are of interest to a range of services and commissioners, and also were of very little direct interest to the library service. All this hard work may actually result in big wins for mental health outcomes, and not the library service. Essentially we found libraries that were producing much greater amounts of value for their community as a result of this approach, but they weren’t necessarily cheaper.

So, a great community institution is excellent at what it does – but it also involves the people who use it, in what it does, and finally it cares about outcomes that matter more to the community than the service.

Matthew Taylor refers to this in his recent post, and we’ve been finding it in a whole range of projects recently. That engagement process which the libraries undertook required a lot of upheaval and change, and some admit they would have given up had it not been the pressure from the funder, and gone back to focussing on service excellence alone. But it was worth it.

It was worth it because of the virtuous circle that involvement created:

Where, however, is the pressure coming from now to do this?

My proposal is this. Service excellence should still be the domain of individual services. Community engagement should be something all frontline services and institutions have an interest in. But not everyone can do it well, so they need help – hopefully Locality and others will support this with their work. But it also requires another institution to focus on the outcomes. This is firstly the job of the local authority or another part of the state: they should care about and track ‘learning outcomes’ in an area, rather than running a really great learning service. But many of the services that are seeing the cuts are the intermediary roles, so as to protect the frontline services the state provides. Who will make sure that the great library, which runs a wonderful mental health project, is tapped into all the networks of an area, and that it is not overlapping with the equally positive class that is run at the community centre? As budgets recede, and more organisations fight for their chunk of what’s left so as to continue to provide their excellent services – who will be pushing the engagement in all services and who will be focussing on outcomes? I have a feeling it won’t just be the state in the future, and that opens up some very big questions about self-interest, governance and accountability, to make sure that we get busy and buzzy places, rather than those just fighting for their survival and compromising value as a result.