Well London: communities working together for a healthier city

Learning Points

• The factors affecting health and wellbeing are many and interrelated –an integrated, community development based approach is crucial in empowering communities to tackle these issues themselves.

• Inclusive and transparent community engagement is essential. Even so, it is difficult to translate the findings into clear plans of delivery and this needs time.

• Characteristics of the place are as important as characteristics of people in determining levels of health and healthy lifestyles and need local work and community knowledge to identify and target.

• Training opportunities are a great incentive for people to participate and help to create strong outcomes.

• Don’t underestimate issues relating to young people. Fund work with young people appropriately.

• Make extra efforts to recruit volunteers to the programme from the outset and train them early so they can encourage other residents to take part from the start of project delivery.

• When coming in new to an area you need time to build relationships and trust with both the target community and with local service providers, and to find out what is really happening in an area.

• Whilst it is important to target communities and necessary to keep them very local, they need to be natural geographical communities. Target boundaries should not cut across natural boundaries or join communities that don’t see themselves as joined.

• Strong, positive partnerships with other strategic players will make interventions more successful.

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