Be less bureaucratic more human.
At Kinship Works we support more human ways of making society better.
We believe many of society’s biggest challenges are complex and human in nature, and don’t have bureaucratic answers. That’s why we start with the human stuff, from communities to relationships.
We’re here to strengthen the wider movement for human alternatives in the best way we can. But right now we notice that four areas of work seem especially helpful.
Our work
Supporting
We can support human approaches - codifying them, sharing the skills they need, and helping them take root even in bureaucratic systems
Learning
We can help to evaluate human approaches in ways that fit their complex nature - helping to see if they’re working, and why, and how to improve them
Spreading
We can help to spread human approaches, telling clear and compelling stories about them, convening practitioners, and building the movement
Reforming
We can help organisations reform, with operating models and ways of governing work that are less mechanistic, and more conducive to human outcomes
Project examples
We work with a range of organisations, from foundations and think tanks to government departments. Here are some examples of our current work.
We are working with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to help leaders in public institutions spread promising alternatives to our old ways of doing things. In this work we will identify barriers to alternatives spreading, such as narrow evidence standards or old-fashioned governance. We will surface ways to overcome these barriers and bring leaders together to talk about how these methods can be used.
This is part of our wider effort to build bridges from the struggling centre of government to what we call the energy at the edges.
We are planning to work with the Future Governance Forum and Barrow Cadbury to codify contemporary practices of government, from relational services to methods for community-led development. If more human alternatives are available, what are they? And how do they operate?
This work builds towards our longer-term plan to host a Governance Pattern Library - a way of curating the many diverse ways human beings can cooperate to make society better.
We are working with Demos to develop a ‘Marshall Plan for civic life’ - a landmark investigation into how the UK could fund a decade of civic renewal. We will explore funding mechanisms that are politically and fiscally viable, looking at international and historic examples, from levies and place-based tithes, to subscriptions and clubs, to crowd-funding and strategic procurement.
We are assembling a broad coalition for this work, so do reach out if you’re a funder or partner interested in joining at ground level.
We are working with Local Trust to synthesise the evidence from over a decade of efforts to rebuild civic capacity and social capital, focusing on the landmark Big Local initiative.
What have we learned from 10–15 years of work to rebuild the capacity of local communities? Is it possible to move the dial? If so, how do we do it? And how should these lessons inform the UK government’s wider agenda for investing in left behind neighbourhoods?