London Engagement Collaborative

The LEC is a pan-London, cross-sector group for anyone interested in working together to involve communities in the work to make London a safer, greener, and more prosperous city for all Londoners.

It will be run through a partnership between the GLA’s Community Engagement Team, Koreo, Migrants in Culture, and International Futures Forum. We recognise that to better embed community voices in decision making, we need to have open and honest conversations about how we engage with communities across the city.

COVID-19 has had a deep but unequal impact on Londoners, increasing existing and interconnected inequalities. A huge amount of engagement and collaboration was carried out by all sectors in London to ease the impact of the pandemic. The London Engagement Collaborative wants to learn from the successes and challenges in engaging communities in these responses on order to:

• centre community experience and expertise in policy making and implementation
• build strong relationships and support collaborative working
• share resources and build collective learning.

We’re inviting local authorities, community and faith groups, funders, academics, and policymakers, to work with us to explore how engagement practice has changed and to build on what we have learned.

The LEC will offer creative and participatory opportunities to share learning and to test new ways of working. We’re committed to creating inclusive and diverse spaces which centre the voices of those who face structural barriers to participation in decision making.

Insight workshops

The LEC hosted a series of insight workshops in June this year with practitioners from across sectors in London. We explored a series of questions and prompts, broadly covering:

• What is currently working well?
• Where are the pockets of hope and innovation?
• What are the existing barriers to these and how might we start to overcome them?