At the end of July 2024, Telescope will have been officially running for five whole years. It’s a huge milestone and a proud moment for us. So we’ve taken the time to reflect a little on our key takeaways, and wanted to share three of them with you here. We’re excited to take these lessons, and many others, into our next phase.

It’s been 5 years of Telescope. What does the future look like?

Based on our experience building a strategy for the Royal Borough of Greenwich, we’ve put together a resource for other organisations working with local authorities, particularly those operating on a consultancy or project-based model. It’s a bit of a “how-to” for co-designing with Councils - in the hope it can help others in the future too.

In May 2024, it will be five years since the first seeds of Telescope were planted. The core of it was simple: bring together policy and practice, so that they could inform one another and build a better world. Take a look back at the story of Telescope through an interview with two of the founders, Hebe Foster and Sarah Holliday.

In 2023, we spoke with the RBG Communities team, who needed a better way to assess need and provision of services, and a strategy to enable it to allocate its Council owned community assets.

We spoke to Voices of Colour founder Indy Sira about her work and why it’s so important to address inequality in the co-design process.

The Star of Greenwich is a pub and community hub in the heart of East Greenwich, which reopened in 2022 under a community ownership model.

What is “co-design”, really? A quick Google throws up lots of definitions, most of them based around the concepts of “designing together”.

Eagle-eyed readers of our newsletter will have spotted that we really love The Democracy Network's new Collaboration for Democratic Change guide, which we shared in our August edit.

We recently delivered a seven-session mutual mentoring programme with Policy Profession, which was designed to support policy and service practitioners' professional development.

If you had to think of a space that was at the heart of your community, what would it be? A school perhaps, or an arts venue; maybe a church or a community hall. You might even choose a library.

One of our key goals is to bring together policy and decision makers with the people who are most impacted by those policies, including voices from our local communities, which often go unheard.

Kit Collingwood is Chief Digital Officer at Royal Borough of Greenwich Council and is a member of Telescope’s board. She’s a keen advocate of diversity and inclusion, with a focus on gender equality and LGBT+ rights. We spoke to Kit about her career, and the changes she would like to see in policymaking.

Drawing on all our experience, and supported by Policy Profession, on March 24th we officially kicked off a mutual mentoring programme between individuals in the civil service.

Nutriri is a social enterprise working to improve access to healthcare, nutrition and movement without focusing on weight.

As we step into 2023, the country is braced for some difficult months ahead with the ever worsening cost of living crisis and spiralling energy prices.

The closure of Year Here throws into stark relief the primary challenge that all entrepreneurs face - that “doing a startup” is hard. It’s particularly hard when you are impact-driven, and therefore have multiple demands on your resources that other businesses might not.

We worked with the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) to assess the impact of their Accelerator on local authorities by mapping their user journey.

How can design thinking benefit policy? And how can policymakers without a specific design training learn to use these tools and methods?

As Telescope turns three this month and we reflect on our journey, we are excited to share our refreshed website and branding that showcases our work and values.