Blog: Community power in a moment of convergence

This blog, written by VS6 Partner and CEO of Wirral CVS, Gareth Prytherch, explores how community power is emerging across the Liverpool City Region at a moment of convergence. Multiple reforms are coming together, creating both opportunities and challenges. Gareth reflects on what this means for the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector and why relationships and trust are key to making shared power work in practice.

Community power

Across the Liverpool City Region, there is growing consensus around a simple but significant idea: the future of public services lies closer to communities.

We see it in Pride in Place.
We see it in neighbourhood health models.
We see it in the NHS “left shift” towards prevention.
We see it in conversations about devolution and place-based leadership.

Individually, these are distinct agendas. Taken together, they represent something more substantial: the convergence of multiple reforms around a more relational, community-centred system.

Seeing the patterns across the Liverpool City Region

This convergence is welcome. It signals ambition. It reflects a maturing understanding that outcomes are shaped as much by relationships, identity and trust as by service design.

But convergence also changes the terrain.

Community power is not simply a funding mechanism or a governance adjustment. It is a cultural shift. And cultural shifts ask different things of all of us.

Different risks, shared stakes

For communities and the VCFSE sector, the shift towards greater influence can feel overdue. Many organisations have long advocated for decisions to be made with communities rather than about them. The language of power-sharing resonates strongly in places where lived experience has not always shaped strategy.

For officers and leaders within local and strategic authorities, however, the shift can feel more complex.

Calls to “shift power” can sometimes land uncomfortably. At its most extreme, it can feel like being asked to relinquish the very levers you are held accountable for pulling. That may not be the intention – but the vulnerability behind it is real.

Officers operate within statutory frameworks, political accountability and financial constraint. They carry responsibilities that are visible, scrutinised and, at times, personally exposing. Relinquishing control is rarely as simple as rhetoric suggests.

At the same time, VCFSE organisations experience risk differently. Many operate with financial precarity and uncertain funding horizons. Their risk is often one of survival or growth. They are accustomed to agility and to navigating ambiguity.

These are different forms of vulnerability. Neither is trivial.

Why relationships matter more than structures

When these different risk environments meet, misunderstandings can arise. Caution can be interpreted as resistance. Urgency can be interpreted as impatience. Power debates can quickly become positional.

If we are serious about community power, we must recognise that this shift is relational before it is structural. It depends on trust. And trust requires safety on all sides.

The role of infrastructure organisations

Wherever we sit in the system – in a voluntary organisation, a local authority, a health partnership or a regional body – we are not observers of this shift. We are participants in it. The way we interpret risk, accountability and control shapes how community power unfolds in practice.

This is where infrastructure organisations have a particular role to play.

Across the Liverpool City Region, the VS6 Partnership brings together local infrastructure bodies and thematic partners who work daily at the interface between community and system. We see the patterns emerging across boroughs. We witness both the energy of communities and the pressures facing institutions. We understand the urgency felt by residents and the constraints carried by statutory leaders.

Our role is not to win power struggles, but to make them unnecessary.

That means creating spaces where difficult conversations can happen without defensiveness. It means translating between sectors and professional cultures that use different language to describe risk and accountability. It means supporting smaller organisations to engage meaningfully while helping institutions design processes that feel robust rather than exposed.

If we are serious about shifting power, we must invest not only in communities but in the relationships and trust that allow institutions to share power safely. That work does not require importing expertise from elsewhere. It exists here, locally, rooted in long-standing partnerships and lived experience.

Turning convergence into coherence

Moments of convergence are significant. They offer opportunity – political, financial and cultural. But they also require coherence. Without attention to relationships, convergence can become fragmentation, with agendas running in parallel rather than reinforcing one another.

With the right support, however, convergence can become something more durable: a shared way of working that endures beyond individual funding streams or policy cycles.

Building community power together

Community power will involve risk. It will involve experimentation. It will require leaders in all sectors to reflect on the roles they play in maintaining or reshaping existing dynamics.

The question is not whether we believe in community power. Increasingly, there is agreement that we do.

The question is how we navigate the human and institutional realities that make that shift possible.

If this moment is to fulfil its promise, it will require courage from communities and from institutions alike. It will require honesty about vulnerability, clarity about accountability and a willingness to work across boundaries.

The good news is that we do not begin from scratch. Across the Liverpool City Region, there are organisations and partnerships already holding this space – quietly, consistently and locally.

As this moment of convergence unfolds, we invite colleagues across public, health and voluntary sectors to reflect on the roles we each play — and to consider how we might navigate this shift together. The VS6 Partnership stands ready to support those conversations, to convene across boundaries and to help translate ambition into practical, locally rooted change.

Community power is not something that can be delivered to communities. It is something that must be built together.