In Autumn 2023, Dudley Council was awarded Commonwealth Games Legacy Funding to support the development of People and Skills within Dudley Borough between 2023-2025. This funding enabled a new local partnership consisting of the two largest employers in Dudley Borough; Dudley Council and Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust. Together they would deliver a shared ambition to improve access to local jobs for local people via a cross organisational delivery model. This presented an opportunity to test new ways of working; moving away from silos, widening practice by collaboratively working across the local system by building authentic partnerships, combining resources to remove barriers and improving outcomes for our communities.
The Skills Legacy Project enables thinking collectively to ensure that Dudley Council and Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust retain the skills required to continue to deliver systemic solutions, by intentionally embedding mechanisms to build our learning infrastructure and organisational capabilities as part of the I Can Dudley programme.
Dudley Council and Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust established a team of enquiry facilitators from CoLab Dudley (enquiry co-hosts), **Health Innovation West Midlands, NHS Black Country Integrated Care Board** and Dudley Council’s People and Inclusion Team. The aspiration was to bring together a range of practitioners with a common curiosity and purpose, who could bring a range of experiences to enhance a collective learning experience.
In summer 2024 public sector practitioners from Dudley Council and The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust were invited on the first learning journey to explore the enquiry question:
<aside> 🔍 How might we build and better apply evaluation practices in the context of our organisations and place?
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Documentation and resources from the 4 month enquiry have been curated below in the Enquiry Dashboard.
Convening this enquiry has inspired curiosity around how Dudley Council , Dudley NHS Foundation Trust and wider partners might work in partnership to create the conditions for releasing the imaginative and creative capacity of change agents within the public sector, to enable the emergence of flourishing futures within our communities in Dudley.
What if… we created safe participatory spaces for public sector practitioners who lead organisational change to:
This would involve exploring how we might further build the relational and learning infrastructure to bring public sector change agents across our place into spaces for learning, imagining and acting collectively with our wider ecosystem. Participating in and co-designing learning activities that enable us to identify and plug capability gaps across place, test how we might invite others to explore a range of learning practices that enable local public sector practitioners to lead change.
Through a systems thinking lens we want to identify barriers for local public sector practitioners to work more effectively across our place, by improving cross organisational learning and participation. A Learning Enquiry is just one way of bringing practitioners together in a community of practice. Other methods could include workshops, virtual coffee spaces, co-working days or learning huddles. Proposals for investment will be developed based on what practitioners say they want.