Last week our Wellbeing Circle hosted the first of our three initial circles.
Alongside the Active Spaces Circle, this marks the first steps towards building WBCF’s dispersed leadership model – and both circles have taken slightly different approaches based on the conversations we had as a wider group.
For Wellbeing, we made the decision to start small and focused.
For these first three months, @ewgcounselling, @feel_purpose_fitness and @bbbcic are working alongside the organisations successfully funded through Thrive in 5.
The thinking behind this was pretty simple: rather than trying to create something that supports everyone, everywhere, all at once, we wanted to see what could happen if we brought a smaller group together around a shared opportunity and gave them space to properly collaborate.
These organisations are about to deliver wellbeing work across the borough, so supporting the people behind that work felt like a really good place to start. But so did connecting the people behind the work.
One of the key intentions of the Wellbeing Circle is to explore how we collaborate better across organisations – getting to know each other, understanding the skills and experience already around the table, sharing what we know and identifying where working together could make our collective support stronger.
And our first circle started with the individual.We focused on knowing yourself.
Creating space to notice where we’re thriving, where we’re struggling and building some simple awareness tools to understand what might be sitting underneath that. From those conversations, the group decided where we go next.
For circle two, we’ll take that awareness and start turning it into habits that help us build capacity – because one of the biggest themes that came through was wanting to create more space for ourselves alongside the work we’re doing for everyone else. That’s really what we want these circles to be about.
Not us deciding what support people need before they walk through the door, but creating space to learn from each other, share skills, build relationships and shape what comes next together. Because better collaboration doesn’t necessarily come from another meeting or knowing which organisations exist.
It comes from knowing the people around the table. Understanding what they bring, what they need and where we can support one another.
And importantly, the learning and relationships we build aren’t supposed to stay in this room. Part of these first three circles will be about working out how we connect what’s happening here back into our wider Wellbeing Circle, with our first opportunity to do that at The Big Meet in October.
And this is only the first version of it. Our hope is that future circles can bring together different organisations, with previous members sharing what they’ve learned and new members bringing their own skills, experiences and ideas. So although we’re starting with a small group, the ambition is much bigger:
To create a ripple effect where knowledge, skills, relationships and wellbeing support keep moving across the borough – building our individual capacity, but also our collective capacity to support the communities we work alongside. We’re learning what this could look like as we go, and we’ll keep sharing that learning with the wider circle as it develops
