Welcome Rebecca Murphy as our new CEO

Rebecca has an outstanding record of leading change across the public sector, including local government, health and care integration and policing. She is passionate about transforming public services with a strong focus on co-production and collaboration between public sector organisations and the communities they serve. 

Lord Victor Adebowale CBE, Collaborate’s founder and Chair said, “I am delighted to welcome Rebecca to the Collaborate team. Her experience and passion for collaboration and public service reform shone through a thorough recruitment process and a very high-quality field. There are great opportunities to drive change in public services ahead, and I am looking forward to working alongside her as she leads Collaborate into its next phase.”

Rebecca joins at a busy time. Below are just some of the highlights of what we’ve been up to this summer:

Reimagining Public Services

From the Wigan Deal to the new era

We’ve been working since spring 2023 with Wigan Council and borough partners on a ‘new era’ for the place, building on what worked from The Wigan Deal to recommit and refresh strategic purpose and relationships. In collaboration with IPPR North, our team led an inclusive and intentional engagement and co-creation process with community members and voluntary and community sector partners through on-the-ground conversations, focus groups, and joint sense-making workshops.

Insights from this effort fed into the co-development of two missions and a broader Progress with Unity plan, the borough’s movement for change for the next decade. Check out our new blog sharing practical insights on how to create spaces for equitable and meaningful conversions between the public and the VCSE and find out more about the impetus for this work in the article Anna co-authored with Alison McKenzie-Folan, CEO of Wigan Council.

Evaluating Camden’s Community Champions

A resident-led approach to improving health and wellbeing

We’ve been supporting Camden Council as the evaluation and learning partner for the Camden Community Champions programme.

Camden has a vision to empower residents to lead changes that improve local health and wellbeing. In 2020, inspired by successful community champion models in other London boroughs, they developed a pilot approach that recruited local people as volunteers to tackle inequalities, improve health and wellbeing, and address local issues of concern.

In addition to uncovering insights into the work, and understanding the impact of the work, our approach built learning capacity through interactions and sense-making workshops with the commissioners, the project coordinators, the organisation leads and most importantly, the residents.

You can read our case study to learn more about the work and our insights.


Commissioning with Communities

Supporting commissioners to reimagine their role

Last week we wrapped up Cohort 2 of our Commissioning with Communities programme. It’s been a real partnership effort delivered collectively by Collaborate CIC, Ideas Alliance CIC and Co-Production Collective, UCL. Each organisation and facilitator brings their expertise and perspective on topics including co-production, Human Learning Systems, monitoring and learning, insight gathering, procurement, alliance contracting and a whole host of other things.

The joy of this programme is getting to learn alongside our brilliant participants. Working in different parts of the country, and in different parts of the public sector, the commissioners each bring a unique perspective and have been so generous with their insights and reflections, building a really strong network of peer support. In our last session, someone described the programme as ‘wonderful, human, varied’ which sums up our past six months together perfectly!

We’re now reflecting on our learning from our first two cohorts and looking to develop the programme further. If you or your team are interested in getting involved in our next programme, you can find out more here and you can also read about what bespoke commissioning support we can provide here.

Further reading

Recent publications from our team

A quiet revolution – Anna Randle considers how the collaboration agenda across public services has changed in the past eight years, and says that with a new era of mission-driven government ahead there is still plenty to do.
Moving away from ‘deliverology’ – A piece written by Elle Dodd about the collaborative skills needed to deliver mission-based approaches – and how you can learn them.

Do get in touch if you’d like to know more about any of the above, or if there’s something we can support you with.

The Collaborate team.