Work With Us

Work with us

Start with the question, not the solution

Work with us
Start with the question, not the solution

We work with communities, educational institutions, voluntary organisations, public bodies, foundations and practitioners who want to develop more participatory approaches to learning, enquiry and change. You do not need a finished brief before contacting us. Often the most useful place to begin is with a conversation about the situation you are facing.

Community and voluntary organisations

We can work alongside community and voluntary organisations to develop: workshops and learning programmes community engagement facilitated dialogue What Matters? projects community enquiry and research participatory evaluation organisational learning practitioner and facilitator development We can work with a single organisation, a neighbourhood, a network or a partnership. A possible starting question How can we create a process in which the people affected by an issue are actively involved in understanding and responding to it?

Colleges and universities

We want to develop meaningful relationships between further and higher education and the communities they serve. Potential areas of collaboration include: community-engaged learning knowledge exchange civic engagement collaborative community projects participatory research professional and practitioner education staff development student involvement in community-based work development of critical and participatory pedagogies We are particularly interested in partnerships that allow knowledge to move in both directions. Educational institutions have important expertise and resources. Communities also possess knowledge that can challenge, inform and enrich teaching, research and professional practice. Our approach envisages precisely this reciprocal relationship between educational institutions and community knowledge.

Public bodies and services

We can support organisations seeking to improve participation, engagement and learning around public services and local issues. Possible work includes: community engagement facilitated enquiry qualitative and participatory research service-user dialogue organisational reflection practitioner learning participatory evaluation exploration of lived experience collaborative project development Our role is not to use participation simply to validate decisions that have already been made. Wherever possible, meaningful engagement should allow participants to influence the questions being asked and the interpretation of what emerges.

Foundations and funders

Funders often want to understand not only what happened , but what changed and why. Participatory approaches can reveal dimensions of community experience and social value that conventional reporting may overlook. We can help with: participatory evaluation qualitative enquiry learning with funded organisations community insight reflective learning programmes capacity-building exploring longer-term social value

Consultancy and facilitated development

Sometimes the need is internal rather than community-facing.  We also work with teams and organisations seeking to examine their own practice. That might involve questions such as: How participatory are our current ways of working? Whose knowledge shapes our decisions? How well do we listen? Where does power sit? How can we develop more reflective practice? How can learning lead to practical change? We can design one-off sessions or longer processes around these questions.

Our way of working

Whatever the context, we try to follow a few basic principles.

Start a conversation

You may have: an idea for a workshop a community you want to engage differently a project you want to develop a question you want to investigate an organisation seeking to reflect on its practice an interest in becoming an educational partner a possible What Matters? project You do not need to know exactly what the answer should look like. That is something we can explore together.