Local Government and Local Partnerships

We help local authorities to collaborate with their partners, to engage their citizens, to understand their impact and to build new strategic visions for their future.

You can commission us to run a big year-long programme, or just a couple of exploratory workshops to help you pin down some key areas of focus. At present, for instance, we are helping councils to reflect on what they’ve learned from the experience of the pandemic, what a local post-Covid future might look like, and what that means for their own organisational priorities in the months and years ahead. We’re especially interested in how councils involve their citizens in that work, and there are lots of ways we can help you to do that.

Our cross-sector experience means that we understand the full local government landscape – from public health to libraries to adult social care – and that we’re well-placed to help your staff, elected members and partners to join the dots between everything the organisation does.

Rob Francis: rob.francis@traverse.ltd

We design and undertake research to help you understand what residents think and feel about the issues affecting their lives, and to provide you with evidence about how well your projects and programmes are working. We understand the need for insights which are person-centred to help inform the needs-led design of projects, programmes and services. On contentious and controversial topics, the rigour of our methodologies and the independence we bring results in evidence that carries weight with different stakeholders.
We design engagement processes that get local people involved in creative, positive ways. We can help you to get the most out of your interactions with citizens using participatory and deliberative approaches on everything from transport to high streets to climate change. We can design processes that invite everyone to contribute, as well as processes that take a smaller number of participants much deeper into a complex topic.
With a long history in organisational development (OD) and leadership, we can help your senior managers and elected members to look at their biggest challenges in new ways, and to help people across the organisation on journeys of change and transformation. This could mean running ‘routes to action’ workshops that help to translate research findings into strategic-level conversations, or action learning sets that give staff the space to support each other with their own development. We also bring understanding of whole systems thinking and what it means to achieve impact in complex systems where no single organisation holds all the levers.
We collaborate with you and the people you work with to design research, engagement and evaluation processes informed by best practice in inclusive practice – ensuring our processes are accessible and rooted in the lived experience of the people you work with and for.