Sustaining place-based change: tools and frameworks for funders

Place-based systems change is often slow, relational, and contested. Yet much of the funding and infrastructure designed to support this work treats sustainability as an afterthought, something to worry about once the work is already underway.

This session brings together Renaisi and Curiosity Society to tackle that gap directly. Renaisi will share findings from their major new inquiry into how place-based systems change is sustained, drawing on a literature review, survey and interviews with funders and delivery organisations. Building on that evidence, Curiosity Society will introduce a set of frameworks and practical tools informed by place-based work across programmes and organisations, including the Local Access, Impact on Urban Health and Citizens UK: the argument that sustainable place-based work requires not just knowledge, resources and capability, but a fourth ingredient, the capacity to act under contestation.

This is a working session: participants will work through practical tools, including pre-mortems, red teaming, and power and opposition mapping, and leave with something concrete to take back to their own practice.

This session will be particularly relevant if you are thinking about how to resource place-based work in ways that build genuine, lasting change rather than short-term outcomes.