Getting started
“Usually we follow an approach where it is clear from the outset what we will do and how we will do it. LEVERS follows a different approach where understanding is more of a process.”
– Center for Social Innovation (Cyprus)
All nine LEVERS projects started with a shared intention of “inclusive learning and transformative action”. Our challenge was to take this intention to our respective local climate challenges and communities. Our shared playbook, the LEVERS Learning Framework, provided the structure needed to get started and create something out of nothing.
New ways of working
The LEVERS Learning Framework captures best practice in education, design and climate justice, with approaches, methods and tools identified as good fit to the pressing challenges of the Climate Emergency. These include Open Learning, Learning Ecosystems, Systemic Design and Participatory Methodologies.
These approaches are different to traditional projects that start with defined outputs. They involve open, participatory and iterative ways of working, better suited to working with complexity. They are used to create directionality rather than control, enabling projects to adapt and change in response to new inputs.
These were new ways of working for most of the LEVERS and Learning Venture partners. Investing time and resources to understand and adopt these new ways of working was critical.
Grounded in a local climate challenge
Local climate challenges varied across our nine locations, from water to heat islands, biodiversity to manufacturing skills. The challenges selected were not necessarily the obvious ones; they were selected according to a mix of factors which balanced local needs (relevance, severity, appeal) with available resources (expertise, skills, networks, potential partners) to establish potential for impact.
LEVERS partners found that there’s no formula for that equation – some project starting points were immediate and obvious, others were only unlocked through exploration.
Cyprus
Lead organisation
CSI Centre For Social Innovation
Local climate challenge
Climate activism meets green entrepreneurship
Ireland
Lead organisation
Trinity College Dublin
Local climate challenge
Food security and public land use in rural towns
Portugal
Lead organisation
Expolab – Centro Ciência Viva Azores
Local climate challenge
Biodiversity protection
Serbia
Lead organisation
Center for Promotion of Science (CPN)
Local climate challenge
Urban pollinators
Switzerland
Lead organisation
Onl’Fait
Local climate challenge
United for fresh water and climate change
United Kingdom
Lead organisation
Forth Together CIC
Local climate challenge
Climate action skills for industry
Insights
Our broad intention, shared playbook and local climate challenge were locked in from the outset. Our commitment to participatory processes and systemic practices meant resisting fixing other parts of the project – these would emerge from a process of research, understanding, design and iteration with partners. This creates a chicken-and-egg style challenge – drawing people in before we knew what the substance of the project was. Our task – to quickly establish:
- Trust and confidence with team and partners
- A robust approach to governance including inclusive decision-making and sign off
- A shared commitment to new ways of working by diverse individuals and organisations
Here’s some things we learned about getting started which underpinned the success of the following stages:
Understand your context
It’s certain that climate learning and skills are urgently needed in all our communities, whether that’s local, like a neighborhood, business related, like a supply chain, or professional, like a sector organisation. 12 Learning providers can have assumptions about how to respond to that need – most usually with things we’ve done before. LEVERS approaches asked us to resist reproducing ‘learning as usual’. Instead we dedicated time to considering our challenge and our context: unpacking the problem, exploring needs and resources, mapping stakeholders including experts and those with most at stake. It can be challenging to justify the time and space for this kind of work and prioritising this exploration was demanding; but it created tangible benefits later in the project.
Hold off on big ideas
Likewise we naturally want to jump in with ideas. Our organisational structures and processes are designed to create certainty as soon as possible. But we know that Climate action projects address complicated and often complex challenges in which cause and effect are unclear and seeming ‘solutions’ can cause unintended consequences. LEVERS partners held off on ideas in favour of systemic approaches, collaborative and iterative working, all of which are better suited to support change through ‘emergence’. This felt risky but being held by a structured process helped to steady nerves. The slow recognition that this approach is less risky than speedy ‘solutioneering’ was the reward.
Find your people
Partnership and collaboration is central to climate action and to the LEVERS programme.
New partnerships are labour intensive work – to knock on doors, open conversations, and see what emerges. It was tempting to rely on local groups or networks primed and ready for partnership. LEVERS partners found that investing in this process reaps rewards. We started wide, using the following questions:
- Who is in my community?
- Are we a single group or a mix of different ones? Who should be in the conversation?
- What is our common interest or need?
- Who else has an interest in those needs?
- How can we ensure the right people are in the room?
- Once we know who we’re interested in what kind of invitation will they respond to (and when is the right time?):
- Open call
- Curated invitations
- Recommendation
- Representative organisations
- Adopting or evolving an existing structure
It was important to start these conversations by listening, being open to others’ ideas, flexible and genuinely collaborative. First conversations, even if we felt there was little to say, had the power to generate insight, influence direction and, ideally, catalyze shared ambition.
Takeaway
Adopt a layered approach to stakeholder convening
Securing ongoing commitment to ecosystemic work by multiple partners can be challenging. Priorities, capacity and motivation between stakeholders and potential partners can change over time. LEVERS partners reported issues of different kinds – we learned to respond with persistence, flexibility and by ‘layering’ our approach to partnering as per the following examples.
Example 1: Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin has significant national convening power in Ireland and could have invited almost any large scale organisation to join their group. Instead they chose to start with engaging individuals and small scale projects. This was time and labour intensive but secured the project in local need and seeded a community which could inform the direction as bigger organisations came on board.
Example 2: LATRA
LATRA found bi-lateral conversations with prospective partners a good tool to shape a formal offer, delaying wider convening until after partners were on board. This secured prospective partners early with a relevant idea tailored to appeal to high value partners – while retaining the principles of flexibility and openness at a later stage between already committed and invested partners.