Defragmenting Support for Women in UK Politics
With a team of service designers, I supported Elect Her in its role as a systems convener, bringing together 30+ organisations across England working toward gender parity in UK politics. The focus was on strengthening the ecosystem itself — aligning vision, reducing duplication, and optimising collective impact within a resource-constrained landscape.
Project Partners:
2 months, London
Tools & methods used: literature reviews, co-creation workshops, workshop facilitation, theory of change
TL;DR
The Challenge
Over 30 organisations across England were working toward gender parity in UK politics — yet overlapping focus areas and limited funding risked fragmentation and diluted impact.
The Process
A large-scale cross-organisational workshop was designed to co-create a shared vision and mission, map organisational focus areas, and surface duplication. Insights were synthesised into a narrative Theory of Change, which was translated into a visual systems-level framework.
The Impact
The visual Theory of Change became a shared reference point across the ecosystem of 30+ organisations in England — clarifying who is working where, identifying gaps, and enabling organisations to coordinate efforts and optimise resources toward a common goal.
This project was conducted to explore how the ambition of 51% women in elected representation in Britain could be optimised by bringing together third sector organisations, academics, political parties, institutions and individuals working in this space to develop a strategic & collaborative approach to the work.
1 main workshop followed by several smaller follow up meetings was co-facilitated via Elect Her and Centenary Action as the organisers and hosts.
The goals of the workshop were to share the efficacy of what has been done so far, map what interventions are in place, identify what's missing from work to date and determine a clear roadmap for greater collaboration to achieve our joint aim.
Participants were invited to:
● reflect on the change mechanisms identified by Elect Her so far;
● map where individual organisations work, their activity and their actions and identify how these
processes sit within the wider ecosystem and where the connections are;
● share learning of what works, identifying the efficacy of what has been done so far as well as
clarifying what doesn’t work;
● identify what interventions have been missing from work to date.
The following was the Visual Theory of Change that was delivered as a result of the insights from the workshop-
Click here to view a PDF
