I have been developing a project to build a more connected and impactful UK democracy sector for over five years. The UK Democracy Network is a civil society infrastructure organisation, comprising an established and diverse network spanning hundreds of organisations across the country, working on a range of issues from civil liberties to civic education. Our work is based on and works to improve upon existing network development, network weaving and network infrastructure practice.

We started the work based on an acknowledgement that those working to improve democracy in the UK were fragmented, not talking to each other enough and lacking access - and the trust required to develop - shared resources. Based on this, we founded our predecessor organisation, the Centre for Democracy at Newspeak House in 2020 and undertook network mapping and seeding activities. Since then, we’ve built a directory of UK organisations working on democracy, regularly extracted their organisational outputs: newsletters, events, grants and socials - and fed this into our comprehensive sector bulletin, sector resources and the connection and capacity building activities we offer to improve the impact of UK democracy orgs and the vital work they do. 

I can share my learnings, practical examples and experiences through undertaking this work. I can help fellows with questions like: what do British democracy organisations care about and work on? How do we build trust in large communities? How do we prevent information and resource bottlenecks in networks? How do you evaluate the impact of network activities? How can I apply network development practices to build trust and collaboration in my sector?