In October 2022 a partnership approach brought together funding secured by the North East London Health Care Partnership relating to health inequalities along with funds secured by the Council to address challenges for the cost of living crisis. Learning from the BD_Collective Adult Social Care network was core to the design of the proposed plan.

 Phase 1 involved a convening organisation, 5 ‘lead’ organisations, a learning partner, Primary and secondary health care colleagues and council colleagues gathering together to start to explore how to shape a model based on the following principles: 

• It’s more important to connect people together, than to ‘fix’ their problems.
• Most residents resolve their own challenges with family, neighbours and informal support, so this scheme will focus on finding how to support, connect and include those who don’t yet have any support network
• Building relationships and trust is foundational for locality working
• The focus will be making help easier to access and the giving of help more fulfilling (and therefore desirable).
• Innovation will be key – we will test, fail, learn, adapt, repeat and systemise the best ideas to support sustainability.

The purpose of the work was to develop a model which connected the whole system. Working together we set out to learn how to:

• Improve the health and wellbeing of residents at a population level
• Build connection, trust and belonging in communities
• Make optimal use of scarce public and social sector resources
• Create a preventative model which helps residents to help themselves and others
• Strengthen community level support for the cost of living crisis

The following diagram shows the process we have taken to understand what we’ve learned and develop this into a ‘phase 2 model’, which, at the time of writing is due to be launched in February 2025. The developed model builds on learning about what a community system resilience approach needs (the commitment and investment by everybody living, working, studying, running a business and regularly visiting has in ‘their’ neighbourhood).

The work is underpinned by an international evidence base that shows that health outcomes are significantly influenced by:

• Residents’ sense of control over their destiny, and their sense of living in a community that has control over its destiny, and can hold government and public systems to account
• The strength of connection, trust and belonging (as measures of social capital and collective efficacy) to community that gives residents permission to both accept and give help to their neighbours
• A dynamic equilibrium between the 5% of work by healthcare systems and the 95% of support offered by family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues and other civil society support around healthcare interventions

The approach seeks to increase residents’ sense of control over their destiny, boost connection, trust and belonging, and break down barriers that impede the 95% of response from family and civil society.

BD Collective Approach to Community System Resilience

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