The old institutions at the centre of public life are struggling, but there is vitality all around the edges — from experiments in deliberative democracy, to the spread of relational practice, to community-led renewal, new futures are being born.
These alternatives could be a source of renewal, even hope, for our struggling settlement. Yet too often they remain separate, struggling to gain permission, investment or space to grow.
The Centre for the Edge is helping to address this. It is an initiative being delivered in partnership between Kinship Works and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We are bringing together senior people with leverage in government to explore what it takes to nurture and spread alternatives, while respecting the needs of the systems they work in.
We are engaging in a year-long period of inquiry, stimulating debate with discussion papers and convening senior leaders for exploratory conversations. We are using this work to build a community and to identify the most important avenues for reform.
We are focused on four themes:
Evidence standards - the narrowness of our perspective, which undervalues promising but unconventional alternatives
Institutions - the monoculture that has taken hold in government, so that diverse institutional forms struggle to spread
Worldviews - the unspoken differences of perspective that seem to inhibit a productive dialogue between the centre and the edges
Power and politics - confronting the reasons systems resist change