The Big Local programme focused on providing funding to disadvantaged areas and enabling communities to decide what to do with that funding. It was designed to put residents in charge of how long-term funding was spent in their area, for the benefit of their community. Residents were not asked or expected to take a particular approach to tackling issues, so did not have to consider issues systemically. By this we mean they didn’t have to consider or address the inter-linked factors creating the societal issues experienced by their communities. So, they most often tackled the local symptoms of systemic problems – particularly inequality – rather than the causes. However, a small number of Big Local partnerships thought of their work through a systemic lens, especially later in the programme.
A Big Local partnership was a group made up of at least eight people that guided the overall direction of delivery in a Big Local area.
Informed by engagement with their community, partnerships developed priorities and plans for their Big Local funding. Approaches to prioritising how to use the funding varied over time and across partnerships. Particularly early on, residents weighed up whether to spend small amounts across several projects (potentially adding up to significant change), or spend a large amount on a big project to solve a big problem. An early lesson for many partnerships was understanding how far £1m could go – which was often not as far as they initially thought.
Partnerships also had to make choices about how to tackle issues –directly, or more indirectly. For example, several partnerships reflected on the stigma around issues like poverty. They recognised that a multi-purpose hub – where people could get financial advice and visit a food hub, while visiting a café – provided a level of anonymity and convenience that could not be provided by siloed service provision. Other partnerships attempted to tackle issues more directly, which sometimes led to backlash, particularly where topics were sensitive and involved difficult emotions like shame. For example, supporting schools in Palfrey to host discussions about how to spot and address signs of grooming.
During Big Local, residents came to understand the complexities around seemingly simple problems – sometimes things they expected would take months to address took years, often because of things beyond their control. For example, reviving a disused space in Beechwood, Ballantyne and Bidston Village and unused land in Canvey Island, involved significant stakeholder engagement and navigating issues of ownership and safety.
More complex issues, although seen as important, were often felt to be too big for a partnership to solve with £1m. For example, tackling homelessness would involve not just funding for accommodation, but dealing with physical and mental health, and other complex issues like addiction. Funds may have been allocated to support organisations working on such issues, but partnerships could not lead that work on their own. Notably, money went further outside of London. This was particularly significant where partnerships attempted to tackle housing issues or develop a community hub.
Residents often saw symptoms of systemic issues in their area and tried to tackle them at the local level. Common themes included financial hardship, food, and energy security; education and employment; loneliness and mental health; and the environment. Approaches to addressing these issues included services in community spaces (like food provision) or targeted local projects (like apprenticeships). These projects supported residents through crises and challenges but couldn’t eradicate the systemic causes. Big Local projects may have contributed to tackling a systemic issue – like Lawrence Weston’s community owned solar farm and wind turbine. While it contributed to tackling the systemic issue of climate change, residents saw it as something closer to home, providing income security for their community.
A Big Local Plan set out what changes the partnership planned to make, how they planned to deliver on this and how funds were to be allocated. It was written for themselves, their community and Local Trust, as a guide and action plan.
While most of the Big Local partnerships focused on addressing issues in their area, a few Big Local partnerships thought of their work more systemically, raising awareness and challenging the status quo at a more societal scale.
This included thinking of their work as a pilot with the potential to be rolled out by stakeholders. For example, the Brereton partnership was inspired by the Newcastle Can campaign, which promoted health and wellbeing through ‘wellness wheels’ with eight key elements of health and wellbeing. The partnership created the Brereton Can campaign, which adapted the original model based on their community’s feedback. They approached Cannock Chase District Council and, using Brereton Can as a pilot, the council created the Cannock Chase Can campaign two years later, with an app available to all residents incorporating the original ideas.
Another approach was engaging stakeholders in government and healthcare to negotiate around local issues. For example, the PEACH partnership successfully leveraged collective voice to influence local powerholders, ultimately leading to major improvements to local housing, and Hackney Wick worked as part of a neighbourhood forum with local community organisations, residents, and health and care providers to address local health inequalities. While this work still focused on issues in the Big Local areas, the approaches were more systemic, as they strategically collaborated with local powerholders to tackle deep-rooted issues.
These examples of working systemically tended to come later in the Big Local programme, as partnerships grew in capacity, knowledge, and confidence. They came to realise that, as £1m only goes so far in tackling complex societal issues that span many policy and practice spaces, there was a need to collaborate and think beyond their areas and existing relationships. The partnerships that approached local issues through a more systemic lens often did so because of professional experience among members and paid workers, or the influence of and support from Local Trust staff and/or those in their broader networks.
Finally, partnerships were sometimes involved in influencing at the national level, through Local Trust’s work to effect local and national powerholders across England, like speaking at events targeted at local authorities, businesses, and voluntary and charity sector (VCS) organisations. Beyond Local Trust’s policy reports (including case studies from Big Local areas), residents were offered other opportunities to share their experiences.
Opportunities included providing testimonials to parliamentarians in Westminster, speaking on panels at political party conferences, and hosting local visits to show how Big Local worked in practice to professionals (like MPs, civil servants, and those working in think tanks or funding bodies). A few residents also took part in workshops to shape Local Trust’s policy team’s work and ensure influencing work was grounded in issues important to them.
Local Trust explores how the organisation influenced policy relating to Big Local in an upcoming article.
Many Big Local partnerships funded workers to support the delivery of Big Local. They were paid individuals, as opposed to those who volunteered their time. They were different from Big Local reps and advisors, who were appointed and paid by Local Trust.
Drawing on Big Local plans, Local Trust engaged partners with the expertise to support partnerships in their prioritised activities and looked for learning themes around which residents from different areas could be brought together. This resulted in two key approaches to supporting partnerships in tackling issues systemically: thematic learning clusters (collective learning opportunities over several months), and targeted support in individual areas.
Learning clusters provided a space for partnerships to create meaningful connections with each other based on shared interests, share learning, and hear from expert speakers. Topic-based clusters were formed (open to all with an interest) and based on key emerging themes, including mental health, the environment, digital inclusion, and youth exploitation and violence. These clusters were successful in supporting Big Local partnerships to think about the bigger picture and identify opportunities for collaboration, while following their lead in terms of what they wanted to learn and achieve. For example, in September 2021, Local Trust’s learning partner Just Ideas convened a two-day learning cluster session on mental health in Stoke, based on partnerships’ feedback and requests. This involved facilitated discussions, case study sessions (led by partnership members sharing their experiences of working on mental health projects in their areas), and workshops by staff from Headstart and MIND.
Local Trust reflected on learning from early clusters in a report.
Targeted support was provided by specialists, commissioned by Local Trust and based on the needs, requests, and interests of partnerships. An example of this was brap’s work to support two partnerships in understanding how they might tackle systemic racism. This action-research project focused on developing practices around making space to critically reflect, improving understanding of diversity and representation, and shifting mindsets and designing projects to tackle the causes and less overt expressions of racism in their areas. This action-research found that sufficient time and resources need to be invested in understanding how racism operates at a local level and the role that community-led initiatives can reasonably play in tackling complex, systemic local inequalities.
brap reflected on how these two areas tackled systemic racism in a report.
While most partnerships delivered many successful and impactful projects, a group of volunteers and £1m could only go so far. Resident-led work can support efforts to understand and meet local needs, tackling systemic issues at the local level, but policy change is needed to address wider issues of inequality that drive many of the problems that Big Local communities focused on.
While only a few partnerships focused on tackling issues systemically, Big Local demonstrates that – with control over resources – residents can have an impact on the symptoms at the local level. Local approaches, such as services that tackle food insecurity, collaborations to address health inequality, or flagship projects like Lawrence Weston’s renewable energy work, could inspire others to do similar.
If, however, future resident-led work also aims to tackle issues more systemically, then efforts could focus on upskilling and supporting residents to do so. This could be achieved through building capacity and training such as learning clusters and targeted support similar to that provided by Local Trust – while remaining grounded in what residents want to focus on and moving at their pace. Local Trust’s approach to policy influencing – supporting residents to guide and contribute to the work – also provides a framework for enabling resident-led work to influence national policy, without overburdening those working on behalf of their communities.
