Work

Our work is always tailored to its context - that’s part of what we mean by being less bureaucratic, and more human. However, we also notice common patterns in the types of work people want help with. Here are four common themes.

  • Supporting

    Bureaucratic solutions are often favoured just because they’re familiar, while more human approaches might be intriguing but feel a little unclear. What is a relational service? How do you activate community agency? How do you engage people in deliberative ways?

    We can help in formal ways - with guides, service patterns, or by codifying a discipline. Or by spreading tacit knowledge - linking people with expert practitioners, or running learning sessions.

  • Learning

    At Kinship Works we’re empiricists. We want to know which approaches work, and why, and how to improve them. But we also know evaluation methods are often mechanistic. For example, RCTs don’t work so well in especially complex contexts. We can help to square this circle - being human and empirical - with organisational models, such as Human Learning Systems, or Test & Learn methods, or with evaluation methods that are designed for complexity.

  • Spreading

    Human approaches often run up against social or psychological barriers. People working in a bureaucracy might see community-led development as risky. Or they might see relational approaches as fluffy. This is why we think spreading human approaches is a social, not a technical, process. It’s less about replicating and more about building a movement.

    We can help by using stories and metaphors to help people see things differently, or by bringing reformers together across an organisation or system, to build momentum.

  • Reforming

    It can be hard to work in more human ways in bureaucratic operating environments. For example, relational services are holistic, but this runs up against siloes. Similarly, it’s hard to be responsive to the public if your organisation has a hierarchical culture.

    We can help with operating models that are more conducive to human methods, from less siloed structures to outcome-based governance, or values-based procurement. And when you can’t change the whole environment, we can help you carve out a little more space to be human.

Examples of our work

The Centre for the Edge with JRF

As old bureaucratic institutions struggle, new practices are taking shape — from relational services, to methods for community-led development, to alternative economic models. These alternatives tend to sit at the edges of old systems, and they remain largely separate, often struggling to gain permission, investment or space to grow. In this work we will help to bridge from the centre to the edge - helping people with leverage in government to nurture alternatives, while respecting the needs of the systems they work in.

Over several months, we will write a series of discussion papers, surfacing methods for supporting alternatives. We will also host a series of conversations to discuss these methods with senior leaders, and explore how they can be used within the constraints of the demanding day jobs. We will focus on four themes:

  • Evidential standards and control mechanisms

  • Leadership and culture

  • Movement-building and politics

  • Operating models and institutional forms

We hope this work will seed practical, follow-on initiatives to further develop these methods and their viability in old systems. Our aim ultimately is to make supporting alternatives a more visible, legitimate, and practical aspect of contemporary public leadership.

Governing Human with Barrow Cadbury and the Future Governance Forum

Governing Human is a project we are planning to codify contemporary practices of government. Our aim is to bring more specificity to practices that can sometimes feel blurry.

Over the last 20 years, in the UK and globally, people have developed new methods for working on complex, human problems. One example is a school of approaches that emphasise the quality of relationships public services can foster with, and between, citizens. Another example is a suite of methods for activating the agency of communities, as opposed to funding point solutions to individual problems.

There is growing evidence that these practices work better than a traditional bureaucratic system of ‘testing and rolling out’ an ‘intervention’. They are especially suitable for complex domains, such as the management of chronic health conditions, or for tackling entrenched disadvantage. Evidence suggests they are less wasteful, less risky, and more responsive to the public.

However, many of these practices are not yet well-codified. We are therefore exploring a project that will:

  • Diagnose why traditional bureaucratic or transactional models struggle, and what makes human approaches effective

  • Codify alternative practices in plain language, describing their tools, disciplines, institutional forms, and success conditions, illuminated with case studies

  • Recommend how decision-makers — from central government to local authorities to neighbourhood leaders — can help to spread these approaches

To make this work concrete, we hope to build it around a geographic case study, most likely in Birmingham and the surrounding city region — a place with a long history of shaping the future, and a centre of vitality for alternative approaches.

Can we rebuild social capital? with Local Trust

Over the last 10-15 years, major efforts have been made to rebuild civic capacity and social capital. Big Local has been one of the boldest of these experiments, investing over £200 million in 150 areas - all led by local residents. This has generated a rich body of evidence, from mixed-methods studies and longitudinal research to dozens of local evaluations. 

We are working with Local Trust to bring together this evidence, along with insights from similar initiatives. We want to understand the power of these methods. Do they work? And, if so, can we be more specific about the most effective approaches?

In this work we will:

  • Synthesize the evidence, situated in the wider body of research on social capital and community agency

  • Illuminate key insights with fresh analysis, case studies, and interviews, highlighting what works, why, and in what conditions

  • Mobilise these insights with practical recommendations for policymakers, funders and practitioners

Our hope is that this will provide useful evidence to shape the next chapter of government investment in neighbourhoods and left behind communities.

A Marshall Plan for Civic Life with Demos

It is now clear we have paid a heavy price for the decades-long decline in social capital, from political disenfranchisement to public services overwhelmed by the knock-on health effects of mental ill-health and loneliness. We also know that fragmented, short-term funding has corroded civic capacity. Too often the organisations, buildings, and people at the heart of community life have had to survive hand to mouth, living on short-term contracts, often smothered in reporting requirements.

The Marshall Plan for Civic Life is a major research project to identify how Britain could fund sustained, multi-billion pound investment in the infrastructure of a vibrant civic life. Are there fiscally and politically viable ways of funding investment at the scale and stability that is needed?

The research will cast a wide net, exploring international and historic examples, from business levies (as used in Brazil), to digital platform taxes, place-based tithes, community share issues, tax mechanisms like Gift Aid, to the use of intelligent procurement by anchor institutions. We want to understand not just where money could come from, but how different mechanisms would shape behaviours and people’s felt sense of ownership and engagement with community life.

In this work we will:

  • Research international, local and historical funding models, analysing their viability and behavioural effects

  • Convene roundtables with practitioners and leaders to test and refine promising approaches for the UK context

  • Shape public debate with publications and events in the run up to future political and fiscal events

Our aim is to move beyond fragmented, short-term project-funding toward sustained investment in the infrastructure needed for a thriving civic life.

Interested in working with us?

We see our work as open explorations, not closed-off projects, so if you are interested in building on any of these themes, or in exploring other topics, drop us a line at hello@kinship.works.

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