‘Keep hope alive’: The Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership, past and present

Uncategorized Wednesday 1 April 2026

By Gary Dymski, YPIP Co-Director

The journey so far 

This iconic phrase of the late Jesse Jackson is an apt title for my first Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership (YPIP) blog. Hope is on life support in today’s world of polycrises – a time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering caused by many different problems happening at the same time which together have a very big effect. Keeping hope alive requires learning from experience, understanding the art of the possible, and planning for better days. This blog shows why Jackson’s phrase fits us by exploring YPIP’s past and present – what brought YPIP into being, and what YPIP has been able to do. In a future blog, I’ll discuss where we go from here.

The past 

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) published a call to create ‘local policy innovation partnerships’ in November 2022, six years after the UK Brexit vote expressed what Prof. Philip McCann called the ‘geography of discontent.’ And while the heroic NHS response to the Covid-19 epidemic briefly brought the country together, the continued stagnation and declining public services of recent years have continued to drive us apart. During the course of the 2010s, a growing sense of disenfranchisement and being left behind permeated the UK, especially in areas outside its more prosperous regions. There were two major efforts by UK Government to respond: the continuing development of devolution and the ‘levelling up’ initiative. However, limited budgetary capacity made it impossible to provide adequate resources for left-behind regions. To the contrary: the number of government employees at subnational government levels fell continued to fall: from 3 million in 2009 to 2 million in 2022.

The UK’s universities, which had begun to adopt civic engagement agendas, were called on to fill in the gap. In November 2022, the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) funded 10 planning grants that would show how universities might help major regions (such as Yorkshire and Humber) meet their policy goals. As it happened, the 12 universities in Yorkshire and the Humber were already working together in a nationally funded project, the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement Research Network (Y-PERN). So, the Y-PERN partners formed YPIP, and as YPIP we secured one of the 10 available planning grants. Between March and August 2023, we held 8 workshops, deliberating over policy priorities for our region’s communities. Our proposal was submitted in mid-September 2023; and in January 2024, we became England’s only ‘phase-2 LPIP,’ funded for the next three years.

The present: bringing YPIP to life 

YPIP’s first year, 2024, involved lots of planning and many unavoidable delays. After that slow start, 2025 was something else again. Our core team – Holly, Lauren, and Lizzie – came together as an unstoppable force and gave YPIP a flying year-2 start. Our YPIP Community Panel – 30 members with lived experience – was selected and trained; and on 2 February 2025, we launched our own call for proposals to our £800,000 Communities Innovating Yorkshire (CIY) Fund. Meanwhile, our work-packages came to life, each making communities a special priority: our Cross-Cutting Theme of ‘communities in their places;’ Work Package 2A, advocating inclusive business practices and good work; Work Package 2B, championing the creative economy and community-led cultural expression; and Work Package 3, supporting the work of the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission and advocating nature recovery and retrofit in our region’s cities. Since our blogs and podcasts describe these activities in detail, I’ll focus here on what we’ve learned thus far.

Our challenges, and what we’re learning 

We’ve faced two big challenges from the beginning. First is our region’s size: it is huge, covering 4 counties, with 5 million residents living in everything from large cities to rural villages. Following the funder’s advice, we made a plan that includes all of Yorkshire and the Humber. Second, our region’s policy stakeholders, especially our local authorities, are short of both time and available uncommitted funds. Our civil servants have
absorbed a lot of budget cuts since 2009-10, and they struggle even to find time to meet, much less to make change.

Working with these two challenges is teaching us about the art of the possible. We have initiated a wide range of activities throughout the region, exploring some directions that policy innovation can take. Because we cover a vast geographic area, our dedicated project teams have learned to communicate, share ideas, and collaborate across university and sub-regional lines.

Our focus on community has generated some of our most important learnings. The first one came with the launching of our CIY fund last February. Every proposal had to be community-led. The response we got showed how deep and wide the appetite for community-led initiatives were. By its closing date (23 March 2025), our CIY Fund ‘call for proposals’ had received 236 proposals seeking a total of £8.4 million – 10 times the funding available. Some sought to sustain work whose funding had run out; others – especially the 22 projects we have funded – sought new approaches. Another key learning moment originated with our Community Panel. Its members – joined by other community participants – let us know that ‘policy’ is not a term that people commonly understand. So, our team initiated a session focused on that: and we learned with each other that ‘policy’ can mean providing the basis of sustainable well-being for all.

Step by step, we are getting there, learning how to ‘bend the mainstream’ (in a favourite expression of our co-director Kersten England) despite the fiscal crisis. Our YPIP practice and our exemplar case studies and CIY Fund projects are showing what policy can be when it takes community voice seriously. And we are being heard: our local and mayoral authorities have not surrendered their ambitions for the city regions they serve; and Yorkshire and Humber’s council’s policy network has been reborn, once more bringing civil servants and academics together. YPIP thus has its part to play in helping our region grapple with how to make our multilevel governance work for all.

Taking all members of our communities as equal partners, and keeping it real with one another, is the way to convert geographies of discontent into partnerships of vision. Our region’s universities can play their part, serving not just as engines of economic growth, but also as facilitators of common purpose. By deepening lines of communication and listening, we are banking policy intentions that open doors for our collective ambitions. In these ways, in Yorkshire, we are doing our part to ‘keep hope alive’.

Head over to our ‘What we’re doing’ section of the YPIP website to find out more about our vast project delivery.