The job of councillors is to make sure the direction taken by the City Council reflects the reality – both opportunities and needs – in communities. This ‘local leadership’ – engaging with people and working in partnership – is a key part of being a councillor. It has never been easy – and current conditions in many ways make it harder.

The aim of this website is make the job a little easier. It is designed to be updated and amended by users. That includes local community leaders who are not councillors as well as ones who have been elected. The website is not full of rules about local governance; but has suggestions for how you might get even better at engagement, partnership and leadership.
Councillors are citizens elected by the community in all parts of the city to serve together so that the direction taken by the Council reflects the realities of city neighbourhoods and communities. These realities are not just local needs, but also local opportunities and assets. Not least communities themselves and their capacity for self-help. Councillors exercise this influence on the strategic policies and directions of the Council including through the parts they play in District Committees and Overview & Scrutiny. They also advocate on behalf of individual constituents and take up their cases to ensure citizens get a fair deal from their Council. Councillors do more: they are local leaders capable, through partnership and engagement with communities, of exercising leadership in ways that make sense in the places, and to the people, they serve.

Local leadership isn’t an ‘add-on’ role for councillors… it is a key part of the job; close to the reason many citizens step up to act as local councillors. But we have to be realistic: it isn’t easy at the best of times to show the kind of leadership that our neighbourhoods and communities need: visionary, communicative, enabling, engaged.  Now:

• although we see localism heralded as the way forward, so many policies affecting neighbourhoods seem more centralised than ever
• local leaders’ hands are often tied by red tape and the consequences of past decisions made in other places
• there is not enough money to run existing services and so councillors – as local leaders – have plenty of experience of returning empty-handed to their wards
• there are far fewer officers employed by the Council
• the need for advocacy on behalf of individual constituents has not diminished – the effect of public austerity is to create more cases, not fewer
• civil society is not straightforward or structured like a Council department or a public agency; working with it effectively calls for skilled engagement and the ability to work accountably in partnership.

Councillors are citizens – volunteers – and there are only so many hours in the day. So, the object of this website is to make Local Leadership a bit easier. First, easier to understand and think about; second, easier to do. The website is designed to be updated and amended with use. In other words, whatever is written here is not written in stone and nor is it complete or comprehensive. If you are using it, you can also help to re-write it by sharing your insights about local leadership in practice. The website is intended primarily for use by councillors, but it should also be useful to people who work with them, including local leaders who are not councillors. It is open to your ideas and suggestions too.

This website is NOT about governance – the mechanisms by which councillors take part in formal Council decision making. It contains no rules, only suggestions. It is about everyday local leadership through: improved community dialogue; organising effective local meetings; understanding community assets and local social capital; using social media and open data; leading and enabling social innovation in the interests of making progress in neighbourhoods – better places to live and work. Before moving on to look at those topics in detail, you might want to look at some reminders of the context – which help to explain why local leadership is so important – in the section on The Citizens’ Council.