CASE STUDY 4: Local Motion

• How funders relate to places, and vice versa (e.g. building mutually supportive relationships and thinking in broader terms than financial value, including the role of communities and funders in decision-making processes, accessing funder capability building programmes)
• How to organise within and across places doing locally-rooted change work (distributed protocols, delegated local resources, cross-site coherence, governance structures that include local coordination and stewardship and higher level national strategic stewardship)
• How to approach decision-making (away from traditional power hierarchies to locally-delegated groups and community experts by experience, inclusive decision-making through sociocracy and CoResolve Deep Democracy and supporting people with lived experience (e.g. Poverty Truth Commissions, People’s Assembly and other lived experience networks)
• How to do capability building across places and funders (systems learning academy, Deep in Place and Practice bespoke support, learning summits, action learning sets)
• How to do contracting (aligning hard and soft agreements and testing collaborative commissioning processes with places )

For Kathleen, complex collaborative governance is about aligning the relational and the structural. It’s not just about distributing decisions, but about ensuring that the ‘soft’ aspects of collaboration - trust, culture, learning - are reflected in the ‘hard’ architecture of legal agreements and governance protocols.

“I was drawn to the challenge of marrying the soft governance of creating space with the hard legal contracting. That’s the frontier of the work.”

She sees Many-to-Many as a practice of holding multiple tensions at once: trust and clarity, autonomy and commitment, emergence and accountability. It also means creating enough scaffolding to allow people to practise and grow - without closing things down too early.

Local Motion was originally initiated by funder chief executives who could see the failures of the funding system and wanted to model a different way of doing philanthropy and support self-sustaining change in places.They recognised that if the answers were easy this work would not be needed. Funders wanted to support the untapped and under-resourced potential of communities to make change and learn how funders could best work with local communities, beyond simply funding work. Each place started by coming up with local visions for their place, bringing in things that matter to their communities. Local Motion then supported national and local partners to develop shared purpose, values and decision-making approaches over time. Kathleen’s work spanned coaching, deep listening, relational design, and co-creating light governance structures that could be adapted by local teams.

One important focus is conflict - not avoiding it, but preparing for it and seeing it as a signal that is helping to surface something that needs to change. Co-designing an agreed group alliance to help participants identify who, and how, they want to be together as a group and how they want to navigate tensions when they surface is crucial. This is part of a broader commitment to learning infrastructure, including a “learning academy” that offers space for reflection and skills development across the network.

Rather than imposing a governance model, the emphasis is on practising in context - supporting people to develop their own capabilities, language, and confidence. Funders are not external to this: in Local Motion supported funders to show up differently in a collaborative space.

“Funders were learning too - they were invited into the uncertainty of emergent work, not just watching it from a distance.”

Kathleen’s background in coaching helps her bring emotional literacy and vulnerability into the work - naming what was difficult, modelling reflection, and supporting others to do the same.

Kathleen began with clarity around her facilitation skillset and developed her coaching skills, but the depth of the work led her to re-evaluate what capability was really needed for deep, relational, systems collaboration. She came to see that many people hadn’t had a chance to practise systems focused facilitation in safe, supported environments - especially when it came to relational work around power.

“People think you have to be perfect to facilitate these things, so they don’t get the chance to practise new skills in a safe way.”

This insight pushed her to focus not just on the governance structures, but on the conditions for practice - what needed to be in place for people to grow into the work. That included patient timelines, peer spaces, bespoke support and back-end infrastructure that didn’t replicate top-down dynamics. She shared the analogy of a gentle slope into the sea - how if you go too fast it’s overwhelming, so you need just enough structure to balance safety with a sense of getting stuff done. Kathleen often found herself supporting people through personal and political shifts, not just project work - holding space for discomfort, uncertainty, and reimagining what was possible.

• Balancing three dimensions of the work - governance, deep conversation, and delivery - without any one dominating. Not trying to do everything at once, but juggling these step-by-step.
• Making the relational labour visible and valued, both in communities and within the funding system.
• Supporting others to create from ambiguity - often without clear templates or paths. This requires working on ourselves as well as working on our relationships with those we are creating change with and the wider systems that we operate within.

Paying attention to power - This shows up in multiple, overlapping ways. It can be about traditional hierarchical power, but sometimes this is about who is the source of creative control and how that is clearly passed on e.g. from funders to places, from national to local. Other times,it is about how external power dynamics are reflected within the group or system you’re working with.

• Name and practise for conflict early. Conflict is normal, but it’s important to be prepared to hold it. People leaned into Co-Resolve Deep Democracy as an inclusive decision-making and conflict resolution process in Local Motion.
• Hold space for capability-building. Learning how to keep learning (and unlearning!) is part of the work, and supporting local people to feel equipped to hold change processes themselves.
• Invite funders into the uncertainty. Don’t treat them as external actors and value the work of bridge-building between worlds.

Keep the structure light but real. Enough to orient and protect - not enough to constrain. There is an art to discerning how ready people are for different interventions.

Local Motion continues to evolve across its six sites. Kathleen’s role - and the wider learning academy - helped to plant seeds of capacity, care and curiosity in each place. The long-term question is not just whether governance can be reimagined, but whether the system can grow the kinds of people, networks and practices needed to sustain it into the future.

She sees the potential for this approach to ripple beyond Local Motion - but only if funders, institutions and communities are willing to do the powerful but slow, relational, sometimes painful work of changing how change happens.

“We need to give people just enough structure to take risks - and to know when to ask for help.”