Access - The Foundation for Social Investment reposted this
Such rich conversations at the Local Access conference in Birmingham over the last two days, which really got to the heart of the opportunities and challenges of place based partnership working, and the huge potential which it brings. Local Access is a special programme for us. It joins together the three pillars of Access's work: enterprise development, blended finance and building infrastructure. And because it is focused on building local social economies it plays a bigger role in directly increasing access to markets for social enterprises, something which is largely beyond our capacity to influence at a national scale. It was inspiring to hear about the ways the Local Access Partnerships are building momentum with public and private sector partners and leveraging more investment and market opportunities for the organsiations they support. This led to discussions about the approaches to systems change which partnerships are utilising and the opportunities that place based working brings to join up silos which at a national level are too rigid to bridge. Since inception we have sought to empower the local partnership as much as possible to set their objectives and operational model, within the context of a small number of broad top down parameters. There has always been a tension in this, with places welcoming the freedom but sometimes finding the lack of a framework challenging. In today's discussions we explored a new dimension of this tension: local decision makers can feel such an overwhelming sense of responsibility to use the money well when considering individual investments, especially in the places which have been starved of this sort of money. But this can have the inadvertent effect of inhibiting risk taking and therefore potentially impacting the goals of broader system building and legacy of the programme. Colleagues from the partnerships discussed how a more overt approach to collectively defining appetite for risk and more explicitly recognising different perspectives and lived experience across the partnership may help with this. It was also great to have our evaluators there from The Good Economy, who are looking at the development of local social economies in the six places, and the Curiosity Society, who are looking at the dynamics of partnership development, so we can ensure that learning from the programme contributes to the broader focus on place across the funding ecosystem. https://lnkd.in/eSMV65G9
