People and Communities: Three Years In

Since 2020, the Foundation has been supporting collaboration in six communities across England and Wales to find new ways of working together in designing, resourcing and delivering services for the benefit of local people. The six communities are: Bolsover, Great Yarmouth, Halton, Merthyr Tydfil, Redcar & Cleveland, and Telford & Wrekin. At the end of 2022 we were three years into a ten-year commitment and throughout this time, we’ve worked with our learning and evaluation partner, Brightpurpose, to apply a developmental evaluation approach so we can reflect, develop, and adapt our approaches continuously.  While we’ve been responding to what is happening and the learning generated regularly, we've commissioned Brightpurpose to publish a three-year evaluation report bringing together what we have learned so far. This evaluation focuses on three questions:

• What does it take to work in a different way with communities and support them to change their corner of the world?
• What works and what doesn’t to enable everyone responsible for local services to think and work differently?
• What difference does it make when we work together with communities to support change?

We’ll be sharing this report ahead of the event and will discuss what we’ve learned in a panel discussion at this event. We also invite you to share your experiences of being involved in systemic change locally. The event will be taking place on 23 November from 14:00-16:00 and will be hosted on Zoom. You can find out more about the event on the registration page.