By that, we mean public services that are more open, where each interaction creates connections, enables active citizenship, and brings together professionals and local people to shifts power structures and harness the power of ‘people helping people’ to change communities and lives for the better.

Over the past decade, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with over 100 social and public innovators to test their ideas and grow their impact across the country.

That's why we launched Field Notes, a monthly blog series to share the experiences and lessons from some of the innovations we have backed - from our grantees, in their own words.

As an innovation charity, we’re committed to testing new things out and learning from what happens. Be it a highlight or serious challenge - we feel it is important to share some of the practical insights, lessons or ‘golden nuggets’ our grantees have learned along the way.

To give a flavour of the types of things you can expect, current and future blogs cover topics ranging from the benefits and challenges of social franchising; what it’s like to use a service design approach for the first time; the importance of embedding an innovation in a complex local system of public services; and what happens when you test something and it doesn’t work.

We’ll be posting a new story here every month, so keep an eye out for more to come and get in touch if anything catches your eye.

Read our latest Field Note from Empathy Lab Founder, Miranda McKearney, who shares what they’ve learnt from evaluating the impact of their Empathy Explorers programme in Welsh schools.

Field Notes to date:

• How scaling funds helped us grow from a start-up to a national charity: a case study from Action Tutoring.
• Five things we learnt about social franchising (from education charity TLG)
• Listening to our older people to help communities tackle fraud (from Neighbourhood Watch)
• Own your principles, discover your methods (from Christians Against Poverty)
• When things don't go as planned (from family support charity Family Lives)
• Handing over the reins: moving from formal to community-focused volunteering (from Absolutely Cultured in Hull).
• Engaging grandparents in early years education (from Deep Roots, New Shoots at the Eden Project)
• Five lessons we learned about measuring impact as a small start-up: a case study from Future Ready Fund grantee, Empathy Lab