Local ecologies and the community coordination opportunity in the Crisis and Resilience Fund
Last week I attended the Resolve Poverty conference in a beautifully sunny Manchester. It was two days of sharp thinking, honest reflection, and the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from being in rooms with people from lots of different backgrounds who share a common purpose. The team at Resolve Poverty did a great job bringing everyone together. There was lots to absorb. For those of us working in England who were (rightly) welcoming the end of the 2-child limit, the existence of a national Child Poverty Strategy and 3 years of Crisis and Resilience Fund, the reminders that our friends in Scotland and Wales are years ahead of us were real. But that’s a good thing right? There’s even more to learn!
One theme that kept pulling me back was also one of the reasons why we established Lathom Solutions.
The CRF has been widely welcomed as a meaningful shift from crisis response towards prevention and resilience. The three-year funding commitment matters enormously. It gives local systems the runway to build something that doesn't just catch people when they fall, but works to change the gradient of the slope. But listening across two days of sessions, I kept returning to the question of what it actually takes to make coordination work?
The community coordination element of the Fund is in my view the most exciting part of the CRF. FINALLY some funding that demands systems work and coordination. Combined with Pride in Place, NHS neighbourhood working, Family hubs, Total Place 2.0 this represents a genuine opportunity to undertake meaningful funded work that could truly build system and community resilience.
So John Hitchin (a Non-Exec Director at Resolve Poverty)’s appeals to "scale conditions, not programmes” and to work with the constantly shifting “ambient social ecology of a place” landed really well with me. Indeed it took me back to earlier in my career when our local Age UK Chief Executive, Graham Gardiner, and local community super-connectors like Will Nicholson, spent a lot of time cultivating our ‘social prescribing ecology’. They were the ‘community catalysts’, the people within communities who hold relationships together and enable coordination. In Manchester it was interesting discussing with colleagues from the North East what it means to understand local ecologies, and how it is often a set of relationships, trust and shared purpose that can take years to accumulate that make those ecologies thrive.
This matters profoundly for how we think about the community coordination element of the CRF. Coordination is not a process, a dashboard, a referral pathway, or a terms of reference for a working group (though these may be some constituent parts). The magic is in building the conditions in which organisations can act together on a shared understanding of need, and keep doing so when the immediate pressure, or perhaps the funding, eases.
What the CRF's community coordination strand offers, if taken seriously and acted upon, is something genuinely rare in public service design: funded time and permission to do that patient work. To understand what already exists before commissioning what's new, a point made directly by the Carers Trust at the conference. To map not just the services in a place, but the relationships between them: where trust runs deep, where there are gaps, where duplication has persisted because no one has had the mandate or the bandwidth to address it. To bring lived experience into the room not as a box-ticking exercise, but as a genuine resource, the people who know how the system actually feels from the inside.
Rob Nellist from LB Barking and Dagenham made a particularly striking point at the conference. They are using their CRF allocation not just to fund activity, but deliberately to build structures that will be sustainable after three years, because they are under no illusion that the funding will simply roll on. I think they’re right here, but the question is what "sustainable structure" means in practice. My view is that it means investing in the coordination infrastructure itself: the relationships, the shared data, the common language, the governance arrangements that allow a system to learn and adapt together over time. This was some of the thinking behind the VCS support contracts we put in place in the last local authority I worked in.
Bolton offered another useful model, aligning their CRF work with their anti-poverty strategy and their wider borough plan, with a clear impact framework running through all of it. Similarly Stoke-on-Trent (hats off to Chief Exec John Rouse showing real leadership of this agenda through attending the conference) taking a mission-led public health approach to poverty with accountability through their Health and Wellbeing Board. That alignment matters and is visible in Scotland too (quarterly meetings on progress chaired by the First Minister? THAT’’s accountability!). Community coordination that sits in a silo, unconnected to other funds and initiatives, will struggle to shift the underlying conditions and just result in disillusionment and disengagement from community partners. Coordination that is explicitly connected to the strategic direction of a place can demonstrate its contribution to outcomes the whole system cares about, and has a real chance of becoming genuinely embedded.
Naomi Eisenstadt, described by another delegate as ‘easily quotable’ and whose career spans Sure Start, advising Nicola Sturgeon on poverty, and much else besides, put it most simply: the answer is love and money. By love she means relationships, the trust and the systems that make people feel seen and supported. By money she means exactly that. Community coordination, done well, is the infrastructure for both. It creates the conditions in which money reaches the people who need it, and in which the relationships that make genuine resilience possible can take root.
The Crisis and Resilience Fund is a significant investment. The question for every local area sitting with that funding right now and looking to years two and three, is whether to spend it on activity, which will undoubtedly be valuable but finite, or to invest a meaningful proportion of it in the coordination infrastructure that could outlast it. That is not an easy call given the short notice local authorities had with the funding levels/guidance (and then additional heating oil-related funding!), the pressure to show immediate impact and the absence of meaningful measures around the community coordination.
At Lathom Solutions, it is a question we are spending a lot of time thinking about. If it is one you are wrestling with too, I would be glad to compare notes.
