Co-creating a new participatory approach at Historic England

The challenge

Historic England wanted to develop a public engagement and communications strategy to help guide the way that the organisation engages and involves the public in its work. We co-developed the new strategy alongside the people who share Historic England’s love of heritage and the historic environment.

Our approach

Through an open call-out on social media and on the organisation’s website, we invited people to share stories of the ways they had taken actions - big and small - to champion and protect historic places. Following this, we brought together a group of 24 people, including everyday citizens, staff and other stakeholders, to develop the strategy with us through a series of workshops.

Through the process it became apparent that there were many more people taking actions to champion and protect the historic places that matter to them than there were involved in Historic England's work directly. So, there was an opportunity to re-orient the organisation’s focus; from one simply involving more and more diverse people in its work, to an organisation always keen to learn from people about the places that matter to them and then to support and enable more people to take action for those places.

Impact and learning

The organisation has now developed a set of resources to support its staff to adopt active participation, less as a strategy to be delivered by one team and more as an approach to be explored by the whole organisation.

New Citizen Project has further supported Historic England in a capacity building programme to support a cohort of staff to become active participation pioneers, and to support and equip their colleagues and teams with the knowledge, skills and confidence to enable more people to champion and protect the historic environment.