How was community leadership supported in Big Local?

Community leadership is the practice of leadership at the grassroots level, usually by volunteers. It can happen in communities of shared place, interests, or causes. Skills associated with community leadership include interpersonal and relationship skills; the ability to articulate a vision for change and a strategy; and being able to make change happen. Legitimacy often comes from accurately representing the community’s priorities and concerns (Terry, 2018).

As a programme, Big Local embodied place-based community leadership on a day-to-day basis (McCabe et al., 2018). Residents led the programme in their Big Local area and made decisions about how money would be spent, based on their community’s priorities and needs. Partnerships were made up of at least eight people, and at least half of them had to be residents of the Big Local area. 

Local Trust explores how the programme’s principles and values kept residents in control in another article.

As such, the Big Local programme was driven by the efforts of community leaders and the structured support for community leadership must be seen within this context. There was also a wide range of support for those delivering Big Local — this article only covers the support focused explicitly on leadership skills.

Local Trust has summarised what the support needs of Big Local areas were, and how they were identified, in another article.

In the initial stages of the Big Local programme, community leadership development wasn’t a named part of the support offer. However, fundamental skills for effective community leadership were important and were developed. Before Big Local partnerships were in place, support and grants aimed to help volunteers get others involved locally, and the role of the rep was crucial in helping ensure that residents led the programme (CDF, 2013; Local Trust, 2022). 

In these early years, targeted support for community leaders tended to be only for people in named leadership positions – chairs and vice chairs of Big Local partnerships. Action learning sets were introduced in 2013 and again in 2016, bringing chairs together in groups, in a structured problem-solving approach. In action learning, each participant brings their challenge to the group, who then ask open questions with a view to solving the issue. Access to a dedicated space to talk through challenges with others in similar roles was valuable to participants. However, attendance was low, with only 15 Big Local areas (out of a potential 150) represented at the 2016–17 action learning sets. This may have been due to the time commitment involved, as levels of interest were initially high (NANM, 2017).

Across the Big Local areas, a consistent, small group of people tended to attend programme-wide learning events and courses (McCabe et al., 2018; Rocket Science, 2016). Often, these were established leaders and many other volunteers and partnership members were not accessing support to the same extent. And while Local Trust never required partnerships to include a chair or vice-chair structure, a hierarchical approach was common within Big Local partnerships. Perhaps partly responding to this, some support did target chairs, such as the action learning sets (OBS, 2020; James et al., 2014). 

These trends in hierarchy and support-access led to the development of a leadership support programme based on the principle of distributed leadership, in 2018–19. This approach sees a shift from the typical individual ​‘heroic’ leader with tight control, to a much less hierarchical approach where people across an organisation or group are trusted to lead different elements of work (Terry, 2018). The emphasis is on supporting others to develop their own leadership skills and capacity to make decisions. Reflecting this, the Community Leadership Academy (CLA) aimed to reach volunteers in the Big Local programme (within the partnership or elsewhere) who were not chairs or vice-chairs, and those more established leaders. To help to achieve this, a nomination system was part of recruitment – applicants could be nominated by supporting staff or partnership members to take part in the CLA. 

A range of skills were addressed by the Community Leadership Academy (CLA). Some of the most common included: 

• practical skills to run meetings well (chairing skills, pacing appropriately, and bringing different and new voices into a meeting)
• communication skills (active listening, recognising the need to give space to others to speak, and having difficult conversations constructively) 
• empathy (understanding how others work and why, and how to develop other people’s confidence)
• influencing wider systems and thinking strategically. 

The CLA used a mix of approaches: peer support spaces; group workshops; masterclasses (introducing new theories and ways of practising leadership); and a series of one-to-one coaching sessions (Terry et al., 2023). Feedback suggested that participants valued connection with those in similar situations, as it provided emotional support and solidarity (Terry et al., 2023). 

Developing self-confidence was also an important part of the CLA, reflecting that many participants did not identify as leaders. Coaching and a popular masterclass on overcoming imposter syndrome were important to building confidence. In feedback, peers of those on the CLA attributed the programme to people’s increased self-confidence (Terry et al., 2023). Some participants moved onto become parish councillors and others developed their media influencing skills, attributing this in part to the skills and confidence they developed through the CLA (Baker et al., 2024).

The CLA was tasked with supporting very different groups of people – those confident and established in their leadership positions and those who did not see themselves as leaders. For confident and established leaders, it was important that support focused on the principle of distributed leadership, developing their ability to step back and let others step up.

Therefore, different types of people can benefit from leadership support if it accommodates different leadership approaches. A core part of the CLA’s offer was one-to-one coaching, which meant that support was able to adapt to the individual’s style – adaptability was a key principle for the support (Koreo, 2024).

The Community Leadership Academy (CLA) was a substantial investment in support for leadership within Big Local and while there were challenges, many of these were overcome and offered useful learning around supporting community leadership. As an eighteen-month course, it was one of the longer support offers; and coaching (which was new to Big Local) was expensive to provide. Despite the significant investment, the CLA didn’t work for everyone – whether because of the commitment involved, or the content. In wave 2, there was a drop-out rate of 35 per cent (although a third of this group were people from partner organisations, not Big Local residents). 

It was not easy for all volunteers to make time for the programme: often having to juggle the commitment with working, caring, and volunteering. Online delivery of much of the content, (brought about largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic) helped make the programme more accessible to the time-poor (Terry et al., 2023). 

Another challenge was around reaching beyond established leaders and those who were keenest to sign up to learning events and support. Not everyone who does community leadership sees themselves as a leader or relates to the term. As such, there was a risk that people would be put off by support advertised as ​‘community leadership development’ or similar.

Local Trust had been aware of this issue from the beginning and addressed it in the recruitment of participants. The CLA seemed to succeed in reaching and boosting the confidence of those falling into this category, perhaps by underlining a non-hierarchical approach from the beginning. CLA participants said they had a greater understanding of community leadership because of the programme.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of implementing the support and lessons of the CLA was resistance from Big Local partnerships. The CLA placed responsibility on the individual to share learning within their partnership, where much was outside of that individual’s control (Terry et al., 2023). To be able to fully put in practice what they had learnt, they needed their fellow residents to be interested and open to changing how they did things.

Some partnerships and chairs were open to reflection and change, and added time to meeting agendas to share learning. But other CLA participants encountered blocks, resistance, or lack of interest. Factors such as timing, group dynamics, the chair’s approach, and the history of relationships within the partnership could have all contributed to how receptive areas were. The CLA delivery team was aware of this challenge and introduced group attendance, in which two or more members from a partnership joined together. However, in practice, this was limited in its implementation. For example, those from the same group didn’t always attend the same sessions (Terry et al., 2023). 

Regardless of whether the partnership was receptive, there could still be a positive impact on the individual and the wider community. Participants brought what they had learnt in the CLA to other community contexts, taking up other positions of community leadership. For example, participants moved on to become a parish councillor, join the board of a local community organisation, and set up a tenants’ association (Baker et al., 2024). While the outcomes of leadership support are affected by people’s social contexts, there is still value in providing bespoke and adaptable support to a wide range of people practising community leadership – whether or not they identify as leaders.