Community Navigator Services CIC

The Community Interest Company (CIC)

Community Navigator Services CIC (CNS) is a user-led organisation with two key aims: to help people help themselves, and to support organisations change to become more accessible and approachable.

We are passionate about social justice, and experienced in advocacy, training, coaching, mentoring, and communication.

We believe we can:

• Work towards social justice
• Help individuals and organisations achieve more through social justice
• Chip away at Dorling’s five tenets of injustice
  • Elitism is efficient
  • Exclusion is necessary
  • Prejudice is natural
  • Greed is good
  • Despair is inevitable.
• Use communication as a tool for progress and change
  • KISS (keep it simple and short)
  • Non-verbal and verbal communication
• Find creative and alternative solutions to problems.

Rob Punton, Jack Nicholas, and Clenton Farquharson

Clenton Farquharson MBE

In 2014, I was awarded the MBE for services to people with disabilities. I am known locally and nationally as a speaker and thinker, consultant, coach, and trainer. I work to understand people and myself in relation to human rights, and social justice, and believe that critical reflection is a great way of doing this.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ — Martin Luther King

Rob Punton

I am an advocate, activist, and poet. I stood for parliament in 2015 and fight passionately for the rights of all people to live the lives they choose. I am passionate about my work in advocacy and will push myself all the way to help people achieve their goals. Some think my wit is rapier-like. I respond well to pressure and like to think outside the box.

CNS, Making Social Justice a Right not a Fight — R Punton

Jack Nicholas

I am an award-winning writer and communication consultant. When not agonising over the placement of a semi-colon, I can be found with Robert and Clenton, chipping away at social injustice. I am good at seeing things from other people’s points of view. Some say I am good at making sense of other people’s ramblings.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one — Occam’s razor.

What we do

• We tackle both sides of a problem
  • Organisation
  • Individual.
• We use co-production.
• We break through frameworks (while recognising their value) to people- and solution-focused approaches.
• We use clear communication:
  • To inform, engage, educate, and entertain us all
  • To help experts reframe and think in depth.
• We look to improve our own work through:
  • Practice
  • PDSA (plan, do, study, adjust)
• Cross-sector research.

How we do it

• Bespoke solutions for each client
• Advocacy (we move people from crisis advocacy to peer advocacy)
• Mentoring and coaching
• Training (bespoke / based on FREDA principles)
• Comms and social media
• Facilitation (including co-production)
• Consultancy
  • Co-production
  • User-engagement
  • Equality and Diversity
  • Accessibility
  • Change management
  • Comms
  • Advocacy.

Our values and principles

Some of our values

• Different
• Creative
• Professional
• Challenging
• Innovative
• Work with people
• Look for people-based solutions
• Create and share insight

Our principles

(What guides us; the lines that we will not cross…)

• We work as a user-led, professional organisation — and we do not believe that these two terms are mutually exclusive…
• We don’t define social injustice by impairment, situation, or environment, but by being denied equal participation in society.
• We believe working to social justice is a change management process.
• FREDA (Fairness, Respect, Equality, Dignity, Autonomy)
• SAVE (Solution, Access, Value, Education)
• Understand, reframe, do, revise (CNS)
• Plan, do, study, adjust (Deming / Toyota)