Service
Partnerships, Governance and Investment
What We Offer
Partnerships, good governance and investment are vital for radical change – in communities, organisations and businesses.
We help our partners to develop the partnership and governance models they need as the ‘backbone’ of activating and incubating the changes they want to make. These can range across:
- Lighter models captured in partnership and collaboration agreements
- Participatory democracy and citizens assembly processes
- New forms of organisation, decision making and deep collaboration approaches.
We work through a robust process to carefully map stakeholders, identify power holders (both champions and potential blockers) and then design, test and develop partnership and governance models that can withstand a range of challenges. This is always an iterative and bespoke process, into which we bring a mix of experience, tested models and design tools.
Governance, partnerships and investment are closely linked. So, we work with partners to develop an economic case and financing mechanisms to bring in suitable capital at speed and scale needed to achieve their goals. Depending on the context, suitable financing mechanisms might include a blend of crowdfunding, community shares, public grants, donations, social bonds, equity or debt. Transformative investment model design is a process of connecting together strategic ambition, plans and business cases, and such blended capital flows from public, private and community sources.
Together, we ensure that our partners design and develop fit-for-purpose partnership, governance, organisational and investment models – to hold and enable the change that their missions, community development and innovations processes demand.
We help you to:
Plan and develop the partnerships you need to succeed
Develop governance models to successfully nurture and protect processes of change and innovation
Design financing mechanisms to bring a suitable blend of capital at the speed and scale needed.
Why
Appropriate partnership, governance, organisational and investment models are vital for holding and enabling the radical processes of change. Especially because the job of leading such change is also one that usually falls beyond the current mandate or business model of any existing community organisations, including municipalities.
Good governance is essential for keeping a safe space for a core team to function effectively in delivering change and innovation. It sounds simple, but it is where many initiatives with great potential fail.
Given that communities will generally need to invest billions of euros over the coming years, if they are to achieve radical change, transformative investment is vital. The reality is that money tends to follow the interests of those who have more of it, rather than the interests of society at large – the acceleration in inequality in recent decades is testament to this. So, we help communities and organisations to achieve the positive changes they want to make by developing a holistic economic case for the change, and mechanisms to get the money to flow to where it is needed and delivers greatest social benefits.