Sharing the Load: Strengthening your Community Group through Collaborative Leadership
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Between March and August 2025, CAG convened a six-month learning programme for Oxfordshire community organisers titled Sharing the Load: Strengthening your Community Group through Collaborative Leadership. The programme, which was facilitated by Transition Together, brought together 23 participants from 12 community groups across Oxfordshire, all grappling with a similar challenge: how to make their groups more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient by sharing leadership more widely.
Many community organisers have told us the same story: they care deeply about the work, but they’re carrying too much of the responsibility themselves.
Why we ran the programme
Many community organisers have told us the same story: they care deeply about the work, but they’re carrying too much of the responsibility themselves. Recruiting and retaining volunteers and committee members can be hard, and stepping back — even when someone wants or needs to — can feel risky for the group. In these situations, organising can be lonely, and people often feel they’re the only ones struggling with these challenges.
This programme set out to respond to these needs, by:
Equipping Oxfordshire community organisers with tools and skills to support others to take on leadership and responsibility within their groups.
Creating a peer learning space for community organisers to connect, reflect, and feel less alone in their mission.
Who took part
Participants came from a diverse mix of community groups working across environmental justice, community-led housing and migrant and refugee support - spanning both rural and urban communities across the county.
How the programme worked
The programme ran over six sessions across six months. The first session was held in person, over delicious food from local social enterprise Damascus Rose Kitchen, with the remaining sessions taking place online.
There were two participants per community group, to help embed the learning more deeply within the group and enable the effort for applying new ideas to be shared, rather than relying on one person.
What we explored together
Across the six months, participants engaged with a wide range of themes, including:
Alternative and horizontal approaches to governance, moving beyond traditional roles like chair, secretary, and treasurer, and exploring models such as sociocracy and consent-based decision-making.
Addressing barriers to involvement and creating inclusive spaces, looking at how power and privilege show up in groups, how such dynamics can affect whether people feel able to get and stay involved, and tools to redress power imbalances within groups.
Designing a welcoming onboarding and "user experience" for new members and, looking at how you design pathways that encourage new members to stay involved in a group - and how to support them to gradually take on more responsibility.
Building an inclusive communication culture, including group agreements, feedback practices, and communication tools.
Ending well, which explored the inevitability of ‘endings’ when it comes to projects, organisations, and people’s involvement in groups, and how groups can handle these transitions in ways that honour people’s contributions, address unresolved tension or conflict, and retain learning and expertise
The focus throughout was on action. Each session ended with a practical “home task”, encouraging participants to try out what they had learned in their own groups before coming back to share their learning.
Each participating group was offered a one-to-one mentoring session to explore how to apply the learning to their specific context and challenges.
Feedback from participants
Here’s what participants told us about their experience of the programme:
“It directly helped us recruit new volunteers, including new Board members, and ask existing volunteers for more help.”
“It's wonderful to feel so supported… I always leave these sessions feeling fizzy and re-charged.”
“A unique and useful way to share our journeys towards similar goals and gain strength from other groups.”
“Thanks for the thought and energy that has gone into this programme of sessions. [...] an indication of your knowledge and awareness of the sector.
“[The programme] helped me become more confident to take my group forward, to build our community and achieve the change we want to see.”
“We learn from each other and are reminded we are not alone in our struggles to provide much-needed services to our communities.”
Sharing the learning: creating a podcast
As part of the session exploring inclusive decision-making, participants were guided through a consent-based decision-making process. Rather than using a hypothetical example, the group was invited to make a real decision together: how to share their learning from the programme with the wider CAG network.
Several options were put on the table, including running an event, creating a written resource, or producing a podcast episode. Through the consent-based process, the group decided that a podcast recorded during the final session would be the most accessible and realistic option. This would allow participants to individually share their key learnings and reflections in a way that felt manageable alongside their other commitments.
Given that the intended audience was other busy community organisers, audio felt particularly appropriate. As one participant put it, a podcast is something you can listen to “while you’re doing the washing up!”
A couple of participants chose to stand aside in the decision, opting not to contribute to the podcast due to capacity, while fully supporting the group to go ahead — a practical example of consent-based decision-making in action.
The resulting podcast captures honest reflections and shared learning from across the programme - listen to it here.
Relevant resources
Below is a selection of resources that relate to the themes covered in the programme, for community organisers who are interested in finding out more:
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