Bringing innovative community engagement to the Innovative Entrepreneurs Programme

The Innovative Entrepreneurs programme is funded by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority as part of Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire’s drive to support local businesses and champion the regional economy. The support is delivered in partnership with a 12-member-strong group of leading businesses and learning organisations, led by Nexus and the University of Leeds. It aims to support individuals who may not otherwise be able to pursue their ideas. Participants will benefit from nine months of training, coaching and business development support.

So, this all sounds great, but why am I involved? I’m a Professor of Health and Wellbeing Evidence in the School of Health at Leeds Beckett University – I’m certainly not an entrepreneur or business guru.  So, what am I doing here?

Well, I and my team at the Centre for Health Promotion Research were asked to be involved, because this programme has an explicit aim to increase the diversity of the people taking part.  We do know quite a lot about how to increase underserved communities’ uptake of health interventions and, more importantly, how not to do it - having updated the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence’s guidance on community engagement in 2016. And, we are passionate about meaningful community involvement.  We also understand the damage that can be done to communities when this is done in a careless or tokenistic way.

But this is not a health intervention – is it? Although in some ways it is – as education, work and income are social determinants of health, as is having a sense of purpose. We were also curious to see how well the lessons learned in health would translate to community outreach for business development.

We began with holding a workshop at a consortium meeting, to present the principles of community engagement in health and brainstorm ideas for how to tweak this approach for the Innovative Entrepreneurs Programme, and the five regions of West Yorkshire.

Following this, it was clear that there were important differences between the five regions that we needed to understand more about. So, we reached out to our networks of community-based organisations to invite community leaders to attend a workshop in each region. At these workshops, we presented the plans for the training programme and access fund and sought feedback on what the barriers and enablers to participation in each region might be. Some of the changes that we made in response are summarised below:

We also enabled participants to submit a video as part of the application process, rather than a lengthy written statement, following discussions about the prevalence of dyslexia.

We have now completed the initial phase of community outreach and it seems that most of the community engagement principles from health have translated very well to the business setting. These principles include:

• Meaningful participatory and inclusive processes
• Open communication/ shared decision-making
• Continuous support for engagers and engagees
• Leveraging and fostering trusting relationships with the community

For further information about the Innovative Entrepreneurs Programme, please visit the West Yorkshire Combined Authority website.