A few weeks ago I was at Stronger Things, New Local's conference on community power. In our workshop on neighbourhood health, one participant shared a reflection that has stayed with me. They'd been at another big health event the week before, where communities, the VCFSE sector and relational ways of working had barely featured. Our session gave them back some hope, they said, because of where we started: with people, building around them.
We hear versions of that a lot. Too many neighbourhood health conversations are still top down and NHS led, and many places are struggling to genuinely involve communities in designing what comes next. All we did at Stronger Things was describe what's already happening in Barking and Dagenham: a strong social sector, organised through deliberate collaboration over time through networks like BD Collective, and work like Connect, where residents, local VCSE organisations and the council are learning and acting together on social isolation, drawing the right support from the community around a person at the right time. Those same principles of radically collaborating to learn ‘what it might take' are at the heart of the neighbourhood health model that's being built here.
