Advice and consultancy

The Shaftesbury Partnership’s advice and consultancy work ranges from early stage community-based projects, to the expansion of successful social enterprises, to reviewing strategies for larger clients. We step in at different stages of a client’s journey to support their development, often resulting in long term engagement as we are called back to do a specific next stage of work.

We work with organisations that are dealing with issues that we strongly believe need addressing, and which can result in real social reform. We particularly specialise in poverty and exclusion, public sector and policy, life transitions, community action and the faith sector. Our strengths lie in our networks, scaling and replication, disruptive innovation, influencing markets and leadership development.

We have three key principles we apply to our work:

1.       Lateral thinking: Our Partners have a wealth of experience in the private, public and third sector, from community based to senior business leadership. They use a lateral approach to an organisation’s issues which may not seem immediately obvious.

2.       Relationship building: Our work is not transactional. We have found that many of our clients return to us after our initial work with them. Our longer term approach allows us to walk with our clients, guiding their journey and providing further support.

3.       Effective change: We often find that our clients have ambitious ideas but little time to think strategically about the change they want to make. It can be a careful balance between working effectively within the system and causing disruption to it. Our aim is to work with clients to be successful in the near term, but create real change in the long term.