Community Led Support Annual Spring Festival

Our Community Led Support programme is hosting its annual online spring festival on 22 - 23 May to share some new developments and research happening. All welcome and this is free of charge. This year we will be sharing:

• Developing work with Children and Young People services to extend the CLS approach

• A range of tools and approaches to understand and help demonstrate impact of strengths based, community led approaches

• The role of Community Spaces and independent research underway exploring that aspect of CLS

• Our developing work to take CLS cross-council and cross-system

Please do join us. For more details and booking form link please see our festival programme, Community Led Support Online Festival Spring 2025.

Programme

Thursday 22 May 2025

CLS Overview 9.30am-10.30am

Community Led Support is a values led, evidence based transformation programme that supports statutory authorities and their partners to collaborate with people and communities to design new ways of working that strengthen independence and wellbeing. If you're new to CLS as a concept do join this overview that will explain what it is, how it works in practice and some of the developments over the past year in extending the reach and capturing impact of the approach.

CLS Children and Young People 11am-12noon

The NDTi Community Led Support approach has proven itself to be an effective programme of change when implemented and embedded in a collaborative way across Adult Social Care, Health and Communities. The approach uses strengths-based practice at its heart for all adults regardless of age, circumstance or location. Colleagues from across the CLS team and NDTi’s Children and Young People’s team have been considering and testing the approach further to reach into the Education and Children’s Social Care sector. Amanda Nally and Jo Gibbs would like to share this with you and welcome your thoughts on this exciting development.

Demonstrating Impact 1pm-2.30pm

An integral part of CLS is being able to capture the difference it is making and to use this information to celebrate and demonstrate its success and to inform it's future direction by learning what works, and what doesn't. CLS is iterative and we take a system wide approach to measurement, evaluation and learning and ensure it is an integral part of change. In this session Mike Richardson will share the developments in relation to this, how organisations that are part of the CLS Network are gaining evidence and intelligence through the use of system data, stories, surveys and feedback to truly understand how changes in the way organisations work are impacting positively on local people.

Friday 23 May 2025

Community Spaces - Learning and Research 9.30am-11.30am

An integral part of CLS in many areas is the ability for people to have conversations and gain information and advice in welcoming community spaces. This session will initially explain the model, how it is applied across the network, sharing the learning so far. We will hear from Doctor Chloe Waterman (KCL) and Professor Robin Miller (Birmingham University), and members of the Research Lived Experience Group who will outline the study underway exploring the impacts and running o these spaces and which builds on the research published last year (see: Culture-not-Process-NDTI-Evaluation-May-2024.pdf )

CLS Total Place 1pm-2pm

CLS is effective in improving the experience and outcomes of people who are, or who otherwise may need to be, in receipt of support from adult social care services. But as CLS increasingly becomes more focused on wellbeing and healthy, thriving communities, it is clear that this is beyond the scope and remit of just adult social care. This session will describe some of the work happening to date across the network that is taking a whole council, whole system approach to CLS.

Please do join us - the booking form can be found here.