What’s a Community of Practice and why is it relevant to retrofit?

Have you ever felt alone, isolated, with no one to turn to for advice or support? Welcome to the world of retrofit!

That might read like a flippant way to start a blog, but the reality of developing a retrofit service is that it’s a sector that is new, emerging and constantly changing. There aren’t any manuals and there’s no simple course you can sign up for to get all the credentials.

When establishing and running a service, there’s a great deal of experience and tacit knowledge that needs to be applied. It’s a case of learning, iterating, succeeding in some ways, failing in others. At People Powered Retrofit, we’ve puzzled over this challenge for some time, especially as people have got in touch for help and advice.

More recently, there has been the emergence of a number of locally-based retrofit services, a mixture of charities, social enterprises and co-operatives which has brought about an informal community - organisations with the same basic motivations, values and a set of common approaches to delivering retrofit services. We often speak to each other, meet at conferences, exchange ideas and reflections on our work.

With the realisation that we have a group of people doing similar things in different places and a bit of background research, we came up with the idea of instigating a Community of Practice - formalise those support networks and develop our shared learning and work.

It is: a Community - a group of people interacting and engaging with each other; who are:

Practising - ie doing the same thing. It’s about developing and sharing stories, case studies, documents and lessons to inform a shared practice and building a collective knowledge base. All this is framed within a shared ‘domain’ of interest, people doing similar roles or with similar expertise.

Once you look for them, Communities of Practice can be found all over the place, they are common within the medical profession and seen as an excellent way to build tacit knowledge and shared understanding of an area, based on the real experience of practitioners that can complement more formal approaches to learning and education.

They are a powerful tool for collective professional development and in the context of a developing sector, applying this tool to community-led retrofit makes a lot of sense: the practitioners are generally working for organisations in different parts of the country, so not in competition, but encountering similar challenges, problems and solutions.

To test out our contention that a Community of Practice can support the development of community-led retrofit organisations - and the sector as a whole - we’ve been lucky enough to access funding from Ofgem’s Energy Redress fund for a two-year pilot project.

Our initial community is based around the partnership that has grown up around the use of People Powered Retrofit’s Home Retrofit Planner platform to deliver retrofit services. All the organisations would identify as ‘community-led’ in some way.

The members of the Community of Practice are: People Powered Retrofit, Futureproof Cumbria, Centre for Sustainable Energy, Changeworks, Bath and West Community Energy, York Community Energy and Exeter Community Energy.

None of us have operated Community of Practices before, so we’ve carried out some best practice research to get it right and on this basis we’ve identified some key things to establish:

• a shared vision;

• participation and engagement;

• community knowledge retention and circulation;

• trust, confidence and the sense of community; and

• inclusive communication.

In order to realise this we’ve embarked on a short, participatory process to collectively define a mission, vision and a set of goals for the Community of Practice, as well as establishing a programme and an effective way to evaluate and learn from the work we’re doing together.

The aspect of this process that has most surprised me to date is that the people involved in the community don’t just want to engage in knowledge sharing and discussion, they want to go beyond that to identify and collectively answer shared challenges that we all face and to create a set of clear and coherent messages that can be used to influence government policy and the help the wider sector learn and develop. This stretches the idea of a Community of Practice beyond simply knowledge sharing.

The set-up phase has generated a wealth of themes and areas that the community want to address from marketing and client persona development to evaluating different assessment methodologies and approaches to articulating the value of retrofit services to clients.

To be able to better tackle these shared challenges we’ve devised a series of themes that the Community of Practice members will explore in turn, articulating challenges, learning from each other through knowledge shares, case studies, site visits and facilitated discussions, before formulating some key learning for ourselves and the sector and disseminating this through blogs and webinars.

We are now at the start of that journey, we’re keen to work together and share and learn, but to extend the learning to the rest of the sector and in time involve more organisations as the sector grows.

Keep an eye out and we are really keen to share our learning as we go.