Welcome to September’s edition of the Cordis Pulse – a monthly digest of key research and policy developments across the sectors in which Cordis Bright provides research and consultancy services, i.e. adult social care and health, children and young people's services, and criminal justice.

A common theme across all our sectors is the importance of effective cross-sector partnership working, particularly between voluntary and statutory sector partners, to improve outcomes for individuals and communities. Voluntary sector organisations hold unique value in understanding, reaching, and meeting the needs of communities who might not be accessing statutory support, so it is vital to understand what works to support effective collaboration across local systems and services. However, partnership working brings challenges; what is often missing from the current evidence base is that the way different organisations operate does not exist in isolation but must be considered in the context of their wider system.

This month, we were excited to publish a system map from our national evaluation of Healthy Communities Together programme. Healthy Communities Together is a is a partnership between The National Lottery Community Fund and The King's Fund. It aims to support effective and sustainable partnership working between the voluntary sector, the NHS, and local authorities in five sites, to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities. Our evaluation is taking a systems-thinking informed approach and aims to understand the difference that partnership working makes for whom, and in what context.

Through a series of collaborative workshops with five HCT sites, we created a system map that answers the question: “what factors help or hinder cross-sector partnership working?”. The map illustrates several themes, some of them familiar and some of them more surprising. The more predictable challenges that partnerships face, such as power imbalances and cultural differences between organisations or sectors, are very much present. Less familiar, perhaps, is the interaction between these challenges, and what helps to overcome them. The map is available here, and we’d encourage you to interact with it.

While the programme-level map provides a useful tool for reflection and for illustrating the complexity of the environments in which partnerships operate, there is also value in the process of system mapping. In particular, workshop participants fed back how useful it is to examine the complexity of partnership working using systems thinking, and how the mapping process allowed them to illustrate the challenge they face together, and to situate their own role within the wider system.
We enjoy supporting clients to use systems thinking across a range of our projects. Other examples include the national evaluation of the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) Changing Future’s programme (more information available here), and in a national systems evaluation of homelessness, also for MHCLG. If you have any questions about our work using systems thinking, please contact Dr Natalie Savona.