Support and development
We work alongside organisations and partnerships working for social justice, supporting your development in a range of contexts, from small, resident-led community groups to national partnerships.
We can work with your staff or board to help your organisation develop and deliver strategy design, leadership, and organisational development. We offer a bespoke package of support to make sure your organisation is clear on its purpose and strategy and is able to deliver on its goals. This includes facilitation of strategic planning; development processes for management teams; whole-organisation workshops and training; and individual coaching or mentoring.
Strategic planning
We work with senior management teams, boards of trustees and other stakeholders to support strategic planning and organisational development. We involve people in shaping the process, to make sure it works alongside day-to-day delivery. We can help you develop theories of change, develop strategic plans and clarify your purpose and values.
Reflect | Recharge
As Local Trust’s Big Local programme entered its final phase, Just Ideas was commissioned to deliver a strategic support offer to help Big Local partnerships drive their plans forward. We co-designed the Reflect | Recharge toolkit with Local Trust and Big Locals.
Fifteen Big Local partnerships took part in the Reflect | Recharge sessions over two years. Participants were able to reflect on their achievements and work out what support and plans they needed to put in place to make the difference they wanted to see in their communities, firming up their legacy plans.
It has been great focusing on what we want and thinking about solutions – with the partnership being able to say what we want.
Leadership development
We provide structured sessions to help build the coherence and effectiveness of your leadership teams. This includes designing a process of skills development and accompanying leadership teams through periods of change or challenge. This can involve mentoring or coaching leaders individually alongside the team process.
Strategic support at St Martins in the Fields Charity (SMITFC)
We worked with the Senior Management Team at SMITFC to develop a five-year strategic plan, in the context of worsening homelessness and great pressure on the sector. Our flexible support package included mentoring for leadership roles, executive coaching and facilitation support.
We tailored a bespoke package of support focused on leadership and change, which included working with the SMT as a team, 1:1 mentoring of senior and other staff, and work with staff teams on specific challenges. This allowed us to provide a 360 view in the support and advice we provided, and helped in planning to tackle any challenges from all angles!
The learning log we shared has helped the team to recognise how far they’d come and how to move forward.
I’m delighted that we’ve made so much progress over the last five months. A big thank you to the Just Ideas team for helping us get here!
Team development, culture change and change management
We offer holistic, tailored support to organisations going through change. This can involve a one-off workshop on working to your values, or a series of sessions to co-design ways of working together in a changing organisational context. We can facilitate sessions to generate understanding of people, processes and strategies, and provide safe spaces to enable people to open up, reflect, learn and generate ideas. Sometimes the most appropriate development opportunity for staff members is an individual mentoring approach. We can offer this as part of a holistic support package, or on a one-off basis when staff would benefit from time to reflect, challenge themselves, or develop their skills. We can also work with organisations to build coaching skills within the staff team.
New Local Staff team – values workshops
We first worked with community power think tank New Local in 2022, initially helping them develop as an expanding team emerging from lockdown. The four hybrid, staff team sessions we facilitated enabled them to reflect on what their values mean, and to work towards an action plan to embed them in all aspects of their work, while building relationships across the teams.
We have also supported their delivery of projects with local authorities with an explicit aim of sharing learning and expertise with the New Local and LA teams, building their skills for future work.
Recent work includes: bringing our creative engagement methods specialists to work with Ealing Council
co-designing ways for communities to get engaged in voicing ideas for shaping their place; supporting three local authorities coming together as Westmorland and Furness Council to explore a collective approach to place-based, community led development; and community consultation in Babergh and Mid Suffolk, gathering the perspectives of disadvantaged or excluded families and residents. Meeting people where they meet, these conversations fed into the refreshed corporate plan and built the district councils’ capacity to engage with their communities in future.
Thank you so much for coming on board during the early stages of us building the practice function at New Local. It has been great working with Just Ideas. I hope you will continue to collaborate with the team and find yourself in many more exciting locations, town halls and community venues around the country in the future!
Partnership development
Collaboration is central to our ethos. We support partnerships – across sectors, across geographies, across communities – to develop their ways of working, or to design their work together. Providing a safe space where everyone can have their say and bring their expertise and experience to the table is at the heart of this work, along with creative tools to get people talking and planning together, leading to action
Case Study: Connecting Health Communities
Over the last fifteen years, Just Ideas Director Helen Garforth has worked as an associate of IVAR to build cross-sector partnerships that tackle health inequalities through programmes such as Building Health Partnerships and Transforming Healthcare Together.
Since 2021, through the Connecting Health Communities programme, this work has focused on delivering transformational changes to health and social care through developing and building partnerships between the health sector, the VCSE (voluntary, community and social enterprise) sector and local people in communities across England.
It brings together cross-sector partners round a health inequality issue in a geographical area, exploring challenges and issues, developing solutions, and taking action for change.
It is not easy doing this alone, and this programme has helped recognise the potential and encouraged people to keep trying and not give up, which is really powerful. There was a real enthusiasm from all involved to move towards the “wouldn’t it be brilliant if” ideas.