Reflecting on Local Area Coordination Week, Alex Fox, CEO at Community Catalysts, speaks about what makes the approach different and unique from other community based initiatives.

What makes Local Area Coordination (LAC) different from other community-based initiatives? That has been something we asked during Local Area Coordination Week (4-8 May) when we celebrated the work of Coordinators and local leads across the country.

There are some great community development initiatives out there, some great strengths-based coaching and support programmes, and some great strategic transformation projects aiming to embed prevention and neighbourhood working. What makes LAC unique is that it attempts to bring three things together. Indeed, we believe that those three kinds of change, at individual, community and place level, need to happen concurrently, for any of them to work.

So a Local Area Coordinator doesn’t see people as cases or referrals. They will accept introductions from colleagues across the system, but also work with people they have gone out into the community to find. They talk about ‘introductions’, because the relationships which work are those that start off on a more equal footing. That community development work means that an LAC who finds people who share a desire to do more exercise but have no transport and limited income, might support those people to meet up regularly at a free park gym, rather than looking for funding for gym membership.

At a recent network meeting of Local Area Coordinators, the Coordinators talked about ‘walking alongside’ people rather than supporting them, and how the most important changes in people’s lives often come from their ability to hold back from offering their advice, opinion or solutions, when, instead, they create the space, confidence and local connections for the person to lead their own change.

When done at scale, this approach starts to drive system change. Some areas already have total coverage of their neighbourhoods through LAC, and as councils, as well as the NHS shift to neighbourhood working, LAC is proving the perfect fit. We’re seen a level of ambition in one or two areas for a shift in the social care system towards LAC not before seen in the UK. This will both drive and require a ‘leftward shift’ towards prevention in the rest of the care and support system.

For instance, where Local Area Coordination becomes the default, rather than an addition to the system, the approach taken by that area’s information, advice and guidance organisations, and the council’s ‘front door’ will need to refocus around what people can do for themselves and each other, and introduce what Human Learning Systems would describe as a Learning Loop, so that can be learned from those strengths-based conversations about the gaps in community resources can inform community development work to fill those gaps.

This approach starts to address what I think of as the paradox of scale: what works in support services feels small and personal, but our challenges feel big and strategic. LAC is one of the few approaches that demonstrates how to address the very big and the very small, all at once.