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It is important to highlight the presence of time and dialogue as a key component of phase 0 of the
model. This process occurred over a number of years, enabled solely by the existence of core funding
from a third party agency that was not linked to the statutory bodies. Overtime, links were built between
statutory bodies and communities through strategic ‘conversations’, which highlighted mutual gains to
be achieved through the parties’ eventual engagement with each other. Woolcock (1998) identifies this
as a process of linking social capital where brokers move between communities in order to facilitate the
transfer of resources to new spaces. The process of building links across groups has also been linked
to the development of inter-organisational trust – where trust with one individual can develop trust in an
affiliate organisation linked to that key individual (Vanneste, 2016). This is symbolised by a quote from
a focus group discussion with community organisation members on the importance of trust within and
across the network.

If [the WCEN director] had asked us to come together five years ago like this, would we have
been interested, maybe not.... but relationship is where it all starts and trust, once you have a
relationship you get to know one another, you get to know what that person’s intentions are, are
they trying to make a difference in a positive way, or are they trying to make a difference in a
destructive way and do they have a hidden agenda, talking about the status quo and people who
are co-ordinated or running groups from whichever age it’s from, so first of all we had to build
this trust amongst ourselves – and it started with trusting

Brokerage also involved a process of linking resources contributed by both groups of actors towards a
new-shared goal – the creation of a new shared and safe space for the development of new ideas,
understanding and recognition. The ability to establish a new space through resource contributions from
both sides is enabled through Putnam’s (2000) notion of bridging social capital, where ties are built
beyond one’s own community to another for the purposes of accessing resources to achieve a particular
goal. In this model, bridging social capital enabled community network member’s access to funding
contributions in order to support events being run at the community level, such as certain healing our
broken village conferences held over the past 8 years. Furthermore, these statutory sector contributions
embodied a willingness for more powerful groups to not only recognise local views, but to make steps
to respond to them, which is often absent from health partnerships between partners of unequal power
and resources (Vaughan, 2011).

Crucially to the process, bridges were also facilitated in a bottom-up direction, where statutory agencies
were given opportunities to draw on local expertise and cultural capital held by community leaders.
While this provided statutory bodies with much needed intelligence about ‘hard to reach’ groups, it also
re-affirmed the power held within communities themselves, establishing the foundations for
empowerment of members from typically excluded groups of society.

Ultimately, the exchange of resources between groups vis-a-vis contributions to developing safe spaces
also represents a transfer of power. As resources move from one group to another, power is positioned
not as something exclusively held by one group over another, but rather as a process of relating, and
a resource that is available to multiple actors, for multiple purposes (Foucault, 2008). More importantly,
power becomes embodied in non-tangible entities, such as key relationships within target communities
and the ability to speak ‘local languages’, highlighting an acknowledgement of more complex notions
of power which has been highlighted as critical for health partnerships (Burgess, 2015). This process
of power and resource exchange is depicted in the model as the bridge between the preparatory phase
0 and phase 1, the latter of which locates processes of coproduction.

It is important to note that once these safe spaces are established, they remain key aspects of a
coproduction process – the BME mental health forum, annual conferences and knowledge exchange
meetings and the coproduction reference group remain platforms where groups of actors can more
readily engage and participate in coproduction at various levels.

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