The Camden Centre for Relational Practice is a research and practice hub launched in November 2024. Run by Camden Council, the Centre is dedicated to creating relational cultures in public services.

Relational public services have to mean more than just ‘having good relationships’. The Camden Centre for Relational Practice is about increasing institutional capacity to do things with people, not to them. To do this, we support public services to put relationships at the heart of staff practice and at the heart of the environments staff work in. 

This goes beyond training people to be relational in their working lives. It also means designing the infrastructure of public services to support relationships in all possible ways, from the language used in a letter to the way a meeting is run. This is the heart of the Centre's philosophy - its both/and. 

Why does this matter? 

The innovation and collaboration we need to tackle 21st century problems such as poverty, housing precarity, loneliness and polarisation require the collective capabilities of everyone in a place - services, businesses and communities. The ability to build relationships, between different people with often very different world views, will be essential. To harness those collective capabilities, public service cultures must change so that relationships are designed into the fabric of our organisations. 

The Camden Centre for Relational Practice believes this is possible - if we are intentional in both equipping public servants with relational capabilities and rewiring the insides of our public institutions so they enable relationships, not fight against them.