Paul Thomas. COIN Co-Chair

Hazel Stuteley. Founder: C2 National Network of Connected Communities

 

This is a summary of the October 2023 COIN meeting. It added to previous COIN discussions about local collaboration, integration and generalism for whole society health. An edited version of the meeting can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyK24LD6i6I 

 

Vision for a Thriving Community:

• Healthcare systems need to be transformed to enable partnerships that routinely make individual and community health relevant to each other. This is needed because they are inter-dependent. You can’t fully have one without the other.

 

• Promoting the health of individuals goes beyond technical, medical care to also include caring relationships, good food, meaningful work, safe shelter and a healthy planet - so everyone feels they have a part to play in making life worthwhile.

 

• Projects in Lambeth & Streatham show that people want Thriving Neighbourhoods where people are informed and empowered with a ‘can-do’ spirit, and a ‘shining’ culture that helps people to support each other through difficulties.

 

How to move towards a thriving community:

• People want to contribute to a thriving community and need ways to do this. 

 

• People need ways to see ‘the bigger picture’ and have honest conversations about how their focused work can affect this.

 

• There need to be good relationships between local people and statutory services in ways that combine technical and social support.

 

How to succeed as a Facilitator of Change:

• Being able to measure changes across whole areas that might indicate a thriving community, for example hope, stress, dying at home, hospital admissions, crime, unemployment, educational achievement, chronic diseases, postnatal depression. 

 

• Academic-Practitioner partnerships can get the best out of both kinds of skill.

 

• Rather than SCALE UP, aim to SCALE ACROSS.

 

C2 Connected Communities Transferable Principles 

• Community Centred & Led

• Place-Based & Collaborative

• Strengths-Based & Relational

• Health Creating

• Complexity Theory Based

Community Centred & Led - community become the lead agency in decision making to:

• Co-create non-hierarchical conditions to lead transformative change for themselves.

 

• Generate and listen to whole community voice.

 

• Locate new community energy for lasting change.

 

• Identify and address their barriers to wellness.

 

• Challenge unfair, unequal power bases.

 

• Identify what’s working well & what people like about where they live.

 

Place-Based & Collaborative - with wider determinants of health: police, housing/health/council/education:

• Brings those who live in an area together with statutory services who work there to address needs of both.

 

• Recognises commonality of issues faced by both parallel communities & their vulnerabilities.

 

• Promotes inter-dependence by working together as equals – no more ‘us and them’.

 

• Leads to emergence of dispersed leadership in both ‘communities’.

 

• Creates new relationship pathways to achieve self-renewing problem-solving, long-term community-led partnerships.

 

Strengths-Based & Relational – Views every community as having existing latent skills. It: 

• Recognises residents as the experts, holding solutions to problems, never the problem itself.

 

• Creates conditions to release hidden strengths and capacity of both residents & agencies.

 

• Focuses & builds on ‘what strong? not what's wrong?’.

 

• Builds strong and diverse new relationships with service providers based on respect, trust and reciprocity.

 

•  Invests in emergent skills of local leaders.

 

Health Creating – partnerships create social & physical environment that is manageable, understandable & meaningful to:

• Create conditions for community self-organisation.

 

• Increase community & individual sense of hope, influence & control to promote resilience.

 

• Reduce levels of stress and chaos to increase community confidence and reverse effects of early life trauma.

 

• Remove barriers to wellness as identified by communities themselves.

 

• Residents become proactive co-producers of change.

 

Complexity theory based - views community as a complex adaptive system with ability to:

• Recognise interconnectedness of all components.

 

• Transform & create new, fairer order by altering the nature and quality of relations.

 

• Create receptive context for transformational change by connecting, deep listening and enabling whole community.

 

• Use exchange visits and peer learning to instil hope by showing what's possible.

 

• Effect large scale system change by implementation of small changes (Trojan Mice).

 

• Generate dispersed leadership throughout community.

 

• Focus on lasting systemic culture shift, not short-term projects to become ‘the way we do things round here’.

 

Obstacles to success:

• People don’t know how to make relationships. They need to learn.

 

• The ‘Establishment’ allocates value to instrumental interventions with short-term effects (like hip replacements) rather than to empowering interventions with long-term effects (like confidence, vibrancy and fun).

 

• Evaluation approaches are not appropriate to the phenomena being explored.

 

• People don’t understand Health Creation. They need to learn.