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Piergiuseppe Parisi and Marynka Marquez

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a strain on the design and delivery of services by local authorities in the UK (OCSI, 2020). Councils across the country have had to respond swiftly to the needs of the population to guarantee their rights to life and nondiscrimination, health and to an adequate standard of living. Despite these hardships, the pandemic has also provided a fertile terrain for the emergence of innovative collaborative practices between the public and voluntary sectors (Groundwork UK, 2020; Lawson, 2020; Russell, 2020a; Russell, 2020b). Alliances between the local authorities and civil society organisations have proved essential to ensuring that services were responsive to the needs of the population (Steen and Brandsen, 2020). Emergency community hubs formed across the UK since the outbreak of the pandemic, where the public sector and volunteers came together to guarantee a rapid response that reached the most vulnerable individuals (Coutts et al, 2020). 

Building on pre-existing plans, the City of York Council has set up a number of community hubs across the city to ensure coordination between Council staff and volunteers. Examples of coordinated efforts include the distribution of food parcels and medicines and in the provision of welfare calls. Alongside community hubs, other less structured co-produced initiatives have emerged that build on already existing partnerships between the public and voluntary sectors. For example, the Council, the police, private businesses and a number of charitable organisations collaborated to provide a number of asylum seekers with shelter and access to basic services. 

This paper provides an appraisal of co-produced responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the City of York: have these practices effectively responded to the needs of the community? What worked well? What could have been improved? Are there practices or models of co-production that have emerged during the pandemic and that could be retained and adapted after the pandemic?

Building on a review of the existing literature on co-produced responses across the UK during COVID-19, this paper relies on data gathered through several semistructured interviews with Council staff and volunteers in the City of York conducted between January and March 2021. Interviews have focused on three key areas:

Times of Covid-19 - An Interdisciplinary Workshop a) Identification of needs and response design – respondents first described how the public and voluntary sectors came together to identify vulnerable individuals and their needs during the multiple lockdowns that were imposed in the UK throughout the pandemic. Moreover, they explained how responses to the needs identified were designed bearing in mind the capacity of the actors involved, in terms of both financial and human resources.

  1. Delivery of services – respondents identified how services were delivered to end users relying on a referral system and a large pool of volunteers across the city. Respondents focused on the operational challenges that the deployment of volunteers evidenced, including for example vetting volunteers, ensuring geographical coverage and minimising health risks for volunteers.
  2. Lessons learned – respondents described strengths and weaknesses of the model adopted in York. While, generally speaking, the collaboration between the public and voluntary sectors was able to deploy a large number of volunteers across the city to respond to a high volume of requests, respondents identified a tension between the Council’s need to quickly deploy their resources and the time-consuming nature of effective co-production.

The data gathered so far show that initiatives built on existing or developing partnerships between the public and voluntary sectors tend to be delivered more organically. Factors that appear to have facilitated an effective coordinated response to the pandemic are: 1) trust between the public and the voluntary sectors; 2) time spent on developing strategic partnerships before the pandemic; 3) organisational culture that does not reproduce ‘command and control’ paradigms; and 4) individual character of the actors involved.

 

References

Coutts, P., Ormston, H., Pennycook, L. & Thurman, B. (2020) Pooling Together: How Community Hubs Have Responded to the COVID-19 EmergencyTrust, C. U.
Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (2020) Communities at risk: the early impact of COVID-19 on left behind neighbourhoods. Local Trust.
Russell, C. (2020a) From Deficit-based to Asset-based Community Driven Responses to COVID-19 (Part 1), Available online:https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/blog/from-deficit-based-to-asset-basedcommunity-driven-responses-to-covid-19-part-1/ [Accessed 11 January 2021].
Russell, C. (2020b) From Deficit-based to Asset-based Community Driven Responses to COVID-19 (Part 2), Available online:https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/blog/from-deficit-based-to-asset-basedcommunity-driven-responses-to-covid-19-part-2/ [Accessed 11 January 2021].
Steen, T. & Brandsen, T. (2020) Co-production during and after the Covid-19 pandemic: will it last? Public Administration Review, 80(5), 851-855.