The Good Shift’s article, ‘Confetti or coherence?’, draws on work with Brisbane South PHN in Australia’s Southern Moreton Bay Islands. Its accompanying resource is Commissioning in Place: A Learnbook from Practice, by Burkett, Cunningham, and Colville.
The authors describe a community receiving many programmes through separate funding relationships, without anyone responsible for how those investments fit together. Families and local organisations absorb the work of connecting provision that has been commissioned separately.
Their six learnings concern stewardship of investment, coordination across jurisdictions, the development of local provider capacity, trust, learning during delivery, and funding the people who connect the system. They offer questions and experiments from a particular place, with unresolved difficulties in governance, contracts, and financial control.
One practical starting point is to map the funding arriving in a place alongside who can authorise decisions. Another is to identify connective work that services already depend on but nobody pays for. Both can expose what individual contract reviews miss.
Read the article and download the commissioning learnbook (PDF).