Putting Communities First: 12 Recommendations

Author: Cormac Russell

A democracy without citizens forming associations is nonsensical. Equally, for the public sector to operate legitimately within a democracy, it must prioritise the interests of citizens and associations over its institutional interests, hence the term public service. Thus, a radical yet common-sense shift is required towards community-centred public services built on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) principles.

In Leeds City Council’s ABCD approach to adult social care, three key shifts can be identified to precipitate a culture change towards community-centred practices:

• From predominantly issue-based to more place-based responses, whereby the neighbourhood is seen as the primary unit of change.
• From institution-first to community-first, with public institutions aligning with and advocating strategically for community priorities at the macro level, and practitioners working directly with communities to build trust at the micro level. 
• From public services having a monopoly on the functions and resources for solving societal problems, to public services being allies in co-producing solutions alongside communities, commercial institutions, and civil society. 

Cultivating community-first practices

Leeds City Council is one among many institutions around the world endeavouring to make this shift from institution-centric to community-centered ways of organising. Here are 12 recommendations for public services looking to cultivate community-first practices, based on lessons learned from their emergent efforts:

1. Offer Solidarity and Advocacy: Stand with communities on inclusive causes to build trust. Start by identifying what local communities are passionate or concerned about and want to take action on, and then explore how your institution can be useful, if at all.
2. Use Your Convening Power: Facilitate dialogue on complex community issues. 
3. Share Economic Power: Enhance local economies through equitable funding, partnerships, and pooled place-based budgets. 
4. Share Personnel Skills: Create avenues for staff to share their talents with communities. 
5. Share Space: Provide low-cost or no-cost facilities to local groups. 
6. Relocate Authority to Community Alternatives: Recognise and support community competencies in mutual care, such as Shared Lives initiatives. 
7. Host a Community Animator: Employ or fund community animators to unlock local assets and power.
8. Decentralise: Maximise decentralisation of staff and services to increase proximity and trust, especially in economically challenged areas. 
9. Support Self-Managed Neighbourhood Teams: Adopt models like Buurtzorg for more effective, localised care. 
10. Establish Department of Neighbourhoods or Vibrant Communities Teams: Create dedicated structures to champion community-centred approaches. The Seattle Department of Neighbourhoods is an excellent example of this in practice; the Vibrant Communities Team in East Ayrshire is another.
11. Facilitate Asset-Based Workforce Development: Provide ongoing professional development, reflective practice, and mentoring for public servants in community animation. 
12. Use Developmental Approaches to Evaluation: Focus on understanding how change happens in complex community environments, learning, and insight instead of auditing. Equally important is the need to ensure that your institution has a mirror held up to it so that it can evaluate its practice and its relationship with power and the relocation of authority. 

Conclusion

Revitalising associational life in neighbourhoods is a net good for those communities and civil society in general. This would serve to renew public services in the following ways.

1. A community-first settlement that realigns the relationship between institutions and communities can reduce burnout. Since public servants would no longer be expected to assume a monopoly on problem-solving, change would be done with communities and by communities.
2. Public trust in institutions would improve because people trust professionals who recognise their agency, autonomy, and the value of their lived experience and social networks.
3. More integrated solutions would emerge because there is a greater opportunity for meaningful long-term collaboration when institutions and associations operate with a common focus on local places rather than siloed, deficit-based, single issues.
4. Change-making efforts would be more sustainable because the collective efficacy of local communities would be core to all future development. An institution-centric approach to any socio-economic or ecological challenge inevitably reduces citizens and their associations to the subordinate status of clients of state-funded services.

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The publisher is Citizen Network. Putting Communities First: 12 Recommendations © Cormac Russell 2025.