What you need to know:
- The Citizenship and Integration Initiative brings together London’s regional government authority (the GLA), civil society organisations, and independent philanthropic funders to further shared goals on social integration.
- This report maps out its key achievements over the Mayoral term 2016-2021.
The Citizenship and Integration Initiative (CII) is a pooled fund, launched in 2017, to support work on citizenship and integration in London. The initiative brings together London’s regional government authority (the GLA), civil society organisations, and independent philanthropic funders to further shared goals on social integration.
Renaisi were commissioned in July 2017 to act as learning partner to the Initiative. Their role has been to support the partners to learn from their activities so they can further refine the model and share key learning with other stakeholders. A previous summative report explored the model in more detail and what can be achieved when regional government and civil society is funded to collaborate in this way.
The aims of this report are to explore and map out the key achievements of the CII over the Mayoral term 2016-2021.
It is challenging to map all the achievements of such a complex piece of work over multiple years. There have been many people involved and many significant outputs. While we have done our best to summarise as completely as possible, this should not be considered an exhaustive list of every achievement over the course of the CII’s lifespan.
The report identifies two main types of achievement:
- Achievements as a result of the new ways of working and added value of the CII model overall.
- Specific achievements linked to secondments, workstreams and projects.
Participants from different parts of the CII tended to agree that the model enabled the following:
- Making the GLA more ‘porous’ and creating new forms of engagement with other organisations: The CII brought people together in ways that disrupted traditional mechanisms of engagement by the GLA and contributed to a culture shift of more open working and deeper trust between different organisations, particularly civil society organisations.
- Enabling the GLA to take a more active, authentic stance in public messaging about integration: Ongoing collaboration with civil society and campaigning organisations meant the GLA and Mayoral team were more informed about how immigration and civic rights issues affect Londoners and, as a result, were less risk averse and better equipped to take a stronger, bolder and more active position in public statements around social integration and citizens’ rights.
- Shaping the agenda on social integration and raising the profile of this work: As a foundational element of the creation of the Social Integration Team and Social Integration Strategy, the CII was seen as ‘deeply catalytic’ when it came to raising the profile of issues around social integration and making these a priority.
There were also achievements specific for each type of participant, summarised here:
For specific achievements from workstreams, download the full report or summary report from the buttons on the left.
12 January 2022
12 January 2022