Thrive at Five is a UK charity whose mission is to help children in their early years develop strong foundations for life and learning. It builds capacity in communities by supporting parents and carers and enabling collaboration across the public, private and voluntary sectors to achieve sustainable change in early years outcomes.

One of its key principles is harnessing the power of parents to create lasting change and positive impact on young children. Thrive at Five is designing a national model around parent participation that is being trialled in “pathfinder” areas and then evaluated to inform a nationally replicable approach.

Nesta partnered with Thrive at Five to harness the power of parents and communities in Stoke – the first pathfinder – to improve outcomes for young children. Our joint initiative tested an approach based on the idea of an inclusive and whole-community network of parents. Through the network, the ambition was to increase understanding of the early years and what matters at this critical time, among parents, by improving access to information services and support for parents. The network aimed to join the dots and increase accessibility to existing initiatives. Through engaging more parents and the wider community, the aspiration was also to scale up community-led initiatives, increasing access to peer-led support.

Working together, we wanted to co-develop a network concept with local parents (who are referred to in the project as community champions) who could go on to run and co-own the network. In this way, local parents would be at the heart of engaging their communities, improving engagement with formal services as well as support delivered by voluntary organisations or more informally. The project recruited and trained a first cohort of volunteer community champions to run a series of activities for other parents over the Summer of 2022 and then assessed what made for successful co-creation.

We already know that sharing power and building inclusive initiatives with communities is vital if we want to avoid another failed top-down solution designed without adequate understanding of the problem. But working with a co-creation model is challenging – it requires different tools, skills and mindsets to more traditional approaches and the eventual initiative will entail trade-offs.

Learning what people need means more than just asking them – being asked to articulate one’s parenting needs by a new organisation, especially when asked directly, is difficult for just about everyone. Being too direct or literal in attempting to understand people’s needs tends not to yield especially useful insights. Instead, we used a range of interactive design-led activities such as storyboarding and future casting, alongside observations, focus groups and interviews, to guide communities through a process of articulating their needs from the Thrive at Five initiative. The result was a richer understanding of what might work for the people of Stoke.

Co-created community-led schemes need to consider their mix of volunteer and paid positions carefully – too much reliance on unpaid volunteers could lead to high levels of churn and sustainability challenges. Conversely, having a mix of paid and unpaid community support could also create challenges related to compensation and motivation. Deft leadership, transparency and good internal communication are all essential to strike the right balance and ensure people feel valued and motivated.

People’s motivations to participate in social action will mix personal and social – successful initiatives need to tap into both. It is especially important to understand people’s individual motivations – such as to gain new skills that might support a way into work, perhaps for the first time, or a career change – and ensure the initiative can cater for these. Being attentive to equity, diversity and inclusion considerations is vital. When establishing new initiatives, it is important to go the extra mile to ensure that those employees or volunteers recruited from the community feel part of – and at the heart of – the organisation.

There’s no such thing as too much communication. To build trust, people need a regular stream of updates and news so they are a core part of developments. People are busy. They will miss messages as life gets in the way of staying on top of everything. Frequent, pertinent communication reduces the risk that people feel left in the dark and lose motivation.

And finally – always provide food and drinks. It is a small detail that makes a big difference.

To find out more about Thrive at Five and follow its progress, visit the Thrive at Five website.