Helping Portsmouth City Council embed a strengths-based approach to public health work, from introductory training through to sustained practice on live projects.
The challenge
Portsmouth City Council’s Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) wanted to build a more collaborative, evidence-informed culture across the city’s public health work. In mid-2025, they began exploring with Ideas Alliance how appreciative inquiry – a strengths-based approach to change, research and evaluation – could help make that happen.
What we did
Phase one focused on building widespread awareness and confidence in appreciative inquiry. We ran a rolling programme of introductory sessions, which drew strong demand from across the council and the wider city, with over 40 people attending each one. An independent evaluation of phase one directly supported the decision to fund a second phase.
Phase two shifted the focus from broad training to embedded practice. We delivered a Project Planning workshop in June 2026, helping participants bring live projects and explore how appreciative inquiry could be applied to them. Alongside this, we launched an open Learning Circle and a series of “Practice Labs”, offering peer and one-to-one support for people putting appreciative inquiry into practice across the city. The first Practice Lab ran in July, with further sessions through autumn.
The work has also found a national platform, including an invited session at the HDRC national conference: “Working with heart: using appreciative inquiry to strengthen the culture of research and evaluation.”
Our impact
Demand has been the clearest marker of impact. Introductory sessions consistently drew more than 40 attendees, and Portsmouth’s own evaluation evidence, combined with attendees going on to use or observe appreciative inquiry afterwards, was cited explicitly as the basis for funding phase two.
That uptake is now visible in practice. One council social worker used appreciative inquiry to scope a new therapeutic fostering hub in Portsmouth, and described reframing a colleague’s frustration on a live case simply by asking “what’s good about this couple?” Voluntary sector participants have taken the approach directly into their own work too, including with a peer-support recovery community group.
With phase two running to November 2026, the programme is shifting from awareness-raising to sustained, embedded culture change, taking support directly to practitioners on live projects rather than relying on training alone, and building a Learning Circle intended to keep momentum going beyond the life of the contract.
Feedback
“Very well run two hours, lots of moving around, interaction, thinking and very little being talked at. The scope for Appreciative Inquiry is vast, from the everyday minutiae of interactions to big project planning.”
— John Hillage, Social Worker, Fostering Recruitment & Assessment Team, Portsmouth City Council
“How empowering it’s been for me to take part in training and genuinely feel like I have learnt so much… Helen and Joe have such a brilliant way of delivering the training. They’re super approachable and inclusive and human and funny.”
— Clare Campbell, Hive Portsmouth
