That was the question behind Party with the Park in Priors Park, Tewkesbury. The answer turned out to be 500 people, enjoying free food for kids, a tea dance, an afternoon tea, live acoustic sets, and a park full of local clubs and groups showing off what they offer to the community. 

Our process started with Bromford's shift towards place-based working. Colleagues sat down with community partners and asked a simple question: what could we do together that none of us could do alone? The answer wasn't a strategy document, or a partnership forum. It was a party. 

On the surface, that's a nice story about a successful family fun day. Relationships strengthened, ideas generated, people had a good time together. Job done. 

I've no doubt some people, drawing on their professional experience, would question whether this is the most efficient way to organise a family fun day, as organising the event was messy at times, communication was inconsistent and there were lots of last-minute decisions. But that's not the point.

But look closer and something more interesting was happening, a slow, deliberate process of building trust. Trust between Bromford and the other community organisations who worked together over the preceding months. And trust with the community itself. 

The outcome is the depth of relationships and people's ability to collaborate with each other. 

It is this process that lays the foundations for long-term, place-based work. As the age-old proverb goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." That principle of going slow to go far runs counter to a lot of corporate experience many of us have had, where the route to success is efficiency, and efficiency drives profit. But that hyper-focus on efficiency can come at the cost of overlooking the relationships between people, especially community relationships, that make anything sustainable possible. 

That distinction matters, because it's easy to mistake internal collaboration for place-based working. Bringing teams together across an organisation is progress, but insufficient. Reaching out to community organisations is progress too. But neither of those, on its own, is a place-based approach. A place-based approach isn't a place-based approach unless the primary stakeholder in that place is genuinely part of it, and that stakeholder is the residents.

The real shift happens when the relationship with the people who live in that place changes.

And self-orientation is the one that quietly undoes the other three: how much of this is about you, and how much is about them. High self-orientation, needing credit, controlling the agenda, showing up to be seen divides everything above it. Low self-orientation multiplies it. 

A funday in the park doesn't build trust by itself.

What builds trust is showing up reliably, being honest about what you can and can't do, creating space for people to be heard rather than managed, and making sure the day belongs to the community rather than to the organisations who helped put it on. Get that right, and the party becomes evidence of something deeper, proof that residents were treated as valued contributors, not an audience to be engaged. 

Which leaves a genuinely useful question for Bromford's place work as it develops: how is trust actually showing up in each place, and how will you know when it's been established?

Not as a box to tick, but as something you can point to, in who turns up, who speaks first, what changes when the community, not the organisation, sets the agenda. 

People want to be involved in their community. They don't need to be persuaded, incentivised, or consulted into it. They just need the conditions that make it easy to contribute and create on their own terms and that starts with being trustworthy enough to be let in. 

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