What we do

We use collaborative and community-based approaches to build bridges between communities and organisations - between stories and strategy

Our services

We partner with local people, charities, councils, community organisations and national bodies on specific projects or as end-to-end delivery partners

  • Collaborative commissioning and alliances

    From relationship building to financial, technical and governance issues

  • Co-production advice and guidance

    Through workshop sessions and supporting you on specific projects

  • Communities of practice

    People learning and sharing together in a safe, open space.

  • Community research and evaluation

    An appreciative approach to quantative and qualitative reviews

  • Strategy and service specifications

    Turn your co-produced ideas into innovative print or online publications

  • Storytelling

    For strategy development, evaluations and to drive change

Our training

We provide bespoke training workshops specialising in a range of topics

  • Co-production

    Bring co-production approaches to life across your organisation

  • Asset-based community development

    Build on the assets that are found in your community

  • Appreciative inquiry

    Organisational change focusing on strengths

  • Collecting local stories

    Connect data to real emotion through storytelling

  • Participatory budgeting

    Empower local people to decide together how to spend money

  • Performance management

    Creatively promote and improve employee effectiveness

  • Community Engagement

    Innovative methods to embed community engagement processes

Our approach

We apply co-production and strengths based approaches in all we do including how we work with clients

We help with shifting cultures and stimulating social action and participation. We can support you to develop new relationships between people and organisations with shared values who want to work together to achieve common goals.

As a small organisation we can give projects our full attention and remain flexible to any challenges or opportunities that arise. We will be hands on from running training sessions and workshops to supporting participants, analysis and report writing. We commit to our client partners and are always keen to roll up our sleeves and get involved on the ground.

Our motto is ‘collaborate not compete’ and we are part of a wide network of similarly minded people and organisations. We work with skilled associates on a project by project basis and have a network of dedicated people from policy developers and programme managers to graphic designers who we collaborate with as required.

“The Ideas Alliance team delivered a really great training day and have given the team a new energy and practical ideas to put in place. We have received some great feedback from the team who all found it very useful!”

Helen Taylor, Health Lead, MyTime Active