Creative Councils announced

Creative Councils is a programme from Nesta and the Local Government Association to support innovators in local government across England and Wales to develop and implement radical innovations that address a long-term challenge that matters in their area.

From May 2012 we are working with six councils to bring their innovative ideas to life. They are:

• Cornwall which is implementing 'Shaped by Us', a technology platform and open innovation model that makes it easier for local communities to put forward creative ideas to solve the county's biggest challenges, a number of which will be co-produced with the council.
• Derbyshire which is developing 'Uni-fi', a bespoke package of support aimed at developing aspiration amongst young people in care, including a guaranteed entitlement to financial support on leaving care to be spent on self-selected goals, which might include further education or training.
• Monmouthshire which through the 'Your County Your Way' programme, is implementing a cultural transformation within the council to listen and respond more creatively to the needs of its communities. Central to this approach is an internal training programme, the Intrapreneurship School, which is building innovation skills.
• Rotherham which is developing 'Rotherham Ready', a council-backed social enterprise that works with the teachers of students aged 4-19 to engage them and their schools in the development of an enterprise-based curriculum, ensuring young people have skills relevant for the future.
• Stoke which is developing its goal to become an energy sufficient 'Great Working City', pushing the boundaries of energy regulation and localism by moving towards local ownership of energy supply and reimagining the role of the council as a strategic broker of resources.
• Wigan which is creating a new economic model for social care in which they meet their service and financial challenges by harnessing underutilised and untapped resources within the local community through volunteering and the development of micro-enterprises.

The aims of the programme are to: 

• Support a small number of innovations to come to life and have real impact
• Help to spread those innovations into other areas, learning about how local government can get better at replication and adaptation of great ideas
• Raise the level and quality of the debate about innovation in local government
• Help develop innovation skills across local government

The programme launched in April 2011 with an open call for proposals from councils that wanted to reimagine the role of local government.  Over one-third (137) of all local authorities in England and Wales applied for the programme, covering an incredibly wide range of ideas from how to support an ageing population to finding new ways to create economic growth.

Summaries of all of the applications are available on Simpl and are tagged on the map below. We have also published a short analysis of the applications called Catching the Wave, as well as the underlying data.

In July 2011 we selected seventeen councils that received financial and non-financial support to develop and test their innovations - all seventeen are known as Creative Councils 2012.  A summary of their ideas can be found here.

A map of all the councils which applied