With a little help from our friends…

The manifesto I published last week featured a commitment to expanding our collaborative working with public sector partners.

If ever there was a 100% solid-state reason for pursuing this to new and greater levels, it’s in the picture of the Ukrainian flag above an earlier post.

The Homes for Ukraine has pitched our public sector comms family in Essex into the production of an information pack for sponsors (those providing homes) and the Ukrainian people and families who will be living in their properties.

This evening we are sending content for print and translation and finalising online versions, having received and collated and edited content from the County Council, 12 district councils, two unitaries, three NHS care systems, two central government departments and the police and fire and rescue services. Our packs contain content aimed at sponsors, and separate content for Ukrainian families (translated into Ukrainian and Russian).

It’s taken us  five working days to pull this together, in the nick of time given the fact that although numbers are currently low, Ukrainians who are part of the scheme are beginning to come through arrivals at Stansted airport now, to what for many will be an emotional meeting with their sponsors.

Leading in this space isn’t easy – it’s time consuming and requires lots of patience. It helps enormously if you have a brilliant and experienced team to work on the process. But in the main it’s about helping your partners do their best and contribute.

We got here and we can do this (in under a week) because of what we learned during Covid about how we can work together, and what works. Now, we need to consolidate this knowledge base by not just sharing our best practice (the easy bit), but shifting our whole focus to think and put place first – locally, regionally and nationally – and not sector group. Public services need representative bodies which better reflect the nature of what we do. And what we do, when we are at our best, is increasingly driven by partnership and collaboration. So must LGcomms and its equivalents be.