Episode 1: Lessons from The Summerfield Community Chest: Shifting Power

As the Summerfield Community Chest concludes, Jill Parker, project lead, reflects on the lessons learnt about co-production and the emergence of organisational partnerships which became a fundamental part of each theme.

Where it all started

In December 2023, Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance was invited by The Summerfield Trust to collaborate on an ambitious and exciting challenge: to “spend down” the Trust’s capital in a way that enabled communities to make decisions about how funding was allocated. We were excited, optimistic and it felt like Christmas. 

In fact, we had been working with Summerfield for the previous three months, developing a strategy around a set of investment themes and an outline methodology that focussed on shifting decision-making power away from trustees to communities.

Why we chose this approach

In an increasingly pressured funding landscape, we wanted to explore an alternative to traditional competitive bid-writing processes. Instead of organisations competing against one another for diminishing resources, we aimed to create a shared process of exploration and discussion about how funding could best be used. 

At the same time, Summerfield trustees wanted their capital to achieve more than simply sustaining existing activity. Their ambition was to invest in projects with the potential to act as catalysts for wider systems change; projects capable of influencing future approaches to service delivery, partnership working, and funding decisions across both the VCSE and public sectors.

The Task Group

In Spring 2024 the project was launched with a comms splash, a webinar and a recruitment drive to establish a group of people from the VCSE sector to help shape and lead the work.  This group, which became known as ‘The Task Group’, was pivotal to the project’s success. Members were consistently generous with their time, knowledge, talents and networks, helping to shape proposals, connect organisations and challenge thinking throughout the process. 

Time 

Summerfield trustees asked The Task Group to complete recommendations for the allocation of funds within a two-year timeframe. This was entirely reasonable and at the time none of us appreciated how it would shape the project. In retrospect, many of our ways of working, actions and decisions stemmed from this. It meant we relied much more heavily on existing codesign and other engagement with communities than we had anticipated, we developed many new relationships in order to draw on the expertise of others, and where possible we worked with established organisational partnerships.

The emergence of partnerships

The first proposal was developed by Gloucestershire Gateway Partnership, a consortium bringing together 40+ local schools, community organisations and statutory and specialist partners. The proposal was grounded in 3 years’ of codesign work with families, built on Gloucestershire County Council’s Family Hubs programme and aimed to create a thriving network of community-based universal support across Gloucester, Cheltenham, Tewkesbury, and the Forest of Dean.  

The strength of this proposal fundamentally influenced the thinking of The Task Group. Although partnerships had not featured prominently within the original strategy, they became central to every proposal that followed. Over time, partnerships came to be seen not simply as a delivery mechanism, but as fundamental to the success, sustainability, and strategic influence of the projects themselves. 

The Benefits of Partnerships

Through the process, several key benefits of partnership working became clear: 

Inclusion
Partnerships enabled informal groups and smaller organisations to participate on a more equal footing alongside larger organisations, both in proposal development and project delivery. 

Support
Lead organisations were able to provide infrastructure, coordination, and practical support that smaller organisations may not otherwise have had access to. 

Resilience
These were ambitious, multi-year projects being developed within a difficult economic climate. Partnership proposals brought together the combined strength and stability of multiple organisations, giving trustees confidence in each project’s long-term viability. 

Practice
Partnerships demonstrated, in practical terms, how organisations could share resources, collaborate effectively, reach communities and scale projects. 

Influence
Finally, partnerships can speak with a collective voice that is more difficult to ignore. When projects mature to demonstrate wider value, partnerships are well placed to advocate for broader systemic change across sectors and geographies. 

Whatever happened to coproduction?

So far, I’ve described an intent that was strongly focused on coproduction and a process that was more heavily characterised by organisational partnerships. So, what happened? 

Firstly, we never abandoned our ambition to shift spending decisions to communities. We discovered that some organisations were already doing this really well and had built deep, trusting relationships within their communities. Where this aligned with the investment strategy, we encouraged organisations to build on existing codesign work rather than duplicate or replace it. 

Secondly, we came to recognise that coproduction is not a project management methodology. It is a way of working grounded in trust, relationships, and shared ownership that develops over many years. Acknowledging this helped us adapt our approach to the realities we faced, including our own capacity, the capacity of the Task Group and the timeframes identified by the Summerfield board.  

One of the most important adjustments we made was ensuring that coproduction became embedded within the delivery phase of each funded project. Significant resources were allocated directly to communities, enabling local people to shape decisions and direct spending according to their own priorities and lived experience.

Conclusion

Looking back, the process evolved in ways we did not fully anticipate. What began as an ambition to create a radical, community-led funding model became a broader exploration of trust, partnership, influence, and systems change. Along the way, we learned that meaningful community power cannot simply be designed into a process; it depends on relationships, credibility, shared purpose, and the infrastructure needed to sustain participation over time. 

Partnerships emerged not as a compromise to coproduction, but as one of the practical conditions that can enable it to flourish. They created the stability, reach, and collective strength needed to support ambitious projects while still keeping communities at the centre of decision-making. 

Most importantly, the work demonstrated that funding can be approached differently, not as a competition for scarce resources, but as a collaborative effort to invest in communities, strengthen relationships, and create the conditions for long-term change. 

We’ll be sharing more reflections from the Summerfield Community Chest over the coming weeks. If you’d like to find out more about the project, you can visit our dedicated webpage.