The challenge
Some young people affected by violence and exploitation in London were missing out on support because services weren’t accessible to them.
The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) wanted to explore how providers could offer joined up services and support, with one clear entry point.
To help MOPAC and its partners take brave steps into a more collaborative way of working, we delivered a package of support that combined energy and confidence with creative approaches and technical expertise. We delivered this work in partnership with our brilliant colleagues at Collaborate CIC.
What we did
Co-designing the service
First, we facilitated a co-design process that aimed to make sure services reflected young people’s priorities, built collaboration between providers and commissioners, and laid the groundwork for collaborative commissioning.
In an initial workshop, we supported commissioners, providers and partners to reflect on the current system’s strengths and challenges. Then we held four appreciative design sessions open to everyone in the sector, which used creative techniques including:
- storytelling to draw out best practice
- Lego Serious Play to help people dream up new solutions
- a ‘fish bowl’ session to enable young people to critique what the group had designed
Throughout the process, we focused on rebalancing power and building more collaborative relationships. Alongside this, we worked with young people to understand what mattered to them, facilitating some focus groups and mentoring the commissioners to run others.
We then ran a final workshop on alliance contracting for providers and commissioners.
A new kind of specification
At the end of the process, we helped MOPAC develop a service specification based on the outcomes and qualities defined by young people and providers – a completely new approach. This gave future alliance bidding teams space to innovate in how they would achieve these outcomes.
Making alliance contracting a reality
Finally, we gave MOPAC technical support and reassurance to run an alliance contracting procurement process and assess how well bidding groups were collaborating. We’re now supporting the successful alliance leadership team to build deeper collaboration in the early stages of its work together.
Our impact
The MOPAC commissioners felt fully supported by our team, as we were on hand any time to offer advice based on our in-depth knowledge of alliance contracting. We were also able to connect them with people already running alliances for further support.
The popularity of our lively co-design workshops, which attracted more people each time, was another marker of success. And these sessions showed participants the potential of collaboration and co-production to energise and strengthen their services.
The alliance is now in its early days, and our continued support will be invaluable to help the team start with a strong understanding of how they can work best together. Due to the collaborative development process and the voices of young people, therapeutic provision is now included within the service offer for the first time.
MOPAC have now asked for our support to commission an alliance for sexual violence services – a huge endorsement of the work we’ve done together so far.
