Rarely does the CTP team get excited about a Corporate Plan, but this week we did just that when we read the newly published South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA)’s 2025-2028 Corporate Plan. Not only does it set out a bold and ambitious vision for delivering for the people of South Yorkshire, but we are taking no little pride in the role they have attributed to our work in its development. 

We were gratified to read these words from SYMCA’s Director of Insight, Kate Mieske. “Our Corporate Plan has been the culmination of lots of work across SYMCA, for which CTP’s involvement was invaluable. It was fantastic to see such engagement from our senior teams at the workshops you ran. I feel they really helped set the tone on our ways of working as we seek to embed our new principles across everything we do. Thank you for your involvement – it was fantastic working with you.”

So what have the team been up to in the region that’s worth shouting about?  

CTP has been working with three brilliant partners (New Economics Foundation, CLES and Cooperatives UK) who make up the Reclaiming Our Regional Economies (RORE) programme. 

Two years of foundation-laying from all the RORE partners, working with everyone from the Mayor to some of the most marginalised local communities, is beginning to emerge in different corners of the SYMCA region. Much of what RORE has brought to the table – rethinking economic priorities, new approaches to inclusion and a focus on meaningful engagement – has been embraced and now built into this plan, which is a big win for long-term change. 

‘CTP can walk alongside local leaders to find a solution that brings multiple co-benefits for people, places and the planet’.

It’s been rewarding to bring CTP’s approach for designing shared strategies to address interconnected social and environmental challenges, and to gain recognition for this approach. Here’s what the report says about our approach and the Mayor’s commitment to a people-led policy to plant 1.4m trees across the region. “With CTP, we developed a framework, covering a range of areas associated with individual, social, economic, and environmental wellbeing for the Mayor’s tree planting campaign. Potential co-benefits have been mapped across a range of policy areas, and this framework will be used as a tool to inform decision-making, programme design, planning of initiatives, and impact monitoring and evaluation. This learning will inform our co-benefits tool for the whole organisation, ensuring the consideration of other social and environmental benefits when designing programmes, making decisions and assessing impact.”

Much of this effort is achieved without fanfare and the way RORE supports our partners to gradually shift how they operate is often a behind the scenes endeavour. But this plan shows real signs of progress: embedding alternative perspectives and fresh ways of working.

Even more exciting is seeing some of the ideas that CTP cherishes most – including the benefits of changing the way progress is measured and a focus on delivering more for local people, places and the planet, all being brought to the forefront.

We often think of ourselves as somewhat stealth change-makers. We are flexible and adaptable enough to start where places are at. Whether that is a focus on health inequalities or better quality jobs and training, or whether the priority locally is climate targets or empty high streets – CTP can walk alongside local leaders to find a solution that brings multiple co-benefits for people, places and the planet. In this case we started helping embed a more holistic approach to a major tree-planting programme across South Yorkshire and are now supporting that way of working to spread across and between multiple parts of the regional economy.

Watch this space as we, and our RORE partners support more and more regions to be bold and courageous in their strategies and beyond.

Liz Zeidler, CEO

You can find out more about the local work we have done in South Yorkshire on using a Thriving Places approach to retrofit and its impact on carbon emissions and fuel poverty in our new blog here. 

Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash