In the summer of 2020, the Tower Hamlets Communities Driving Change (CDC) team at The Young Foundation came together with FutureGov to understand how communities were responding to the public health challenge of Covid-19. We explored how we could work together as a programme to ensure we continued to support communities to drive change in unpredictable and unprecedented times. We have been inspired by the incredible resilience and community spirit residents in Tower Hamlets have shown coming together to support one another – creating activities for kids under lockdown, emergency food distribution centres and much more.
The report outlines our learning approach from Covid response to recovery and shares a series of insights and recommendations for partners across the programme. By sharing this report, we hope to showcase the ways in which systems can work together collaboratively to support local communities to improve health, wellbeing and resilience across the country.
We invite you to consider how your community functions as a system in which people, organisations and services exist and in what ways are they connected or unconnected. What might be blocking things from happening, or could enable changes to be made? What root causes are at play and how might they be interconnected? Feel free to use the tools shared in this work to map your ideas and start the conversation. We call on all players – from community activists, to businesses, local authorities and more – to think about their role in creating change, to reach out to one another, and embrace the approaches and recommendations outlined in these reports.
Posted on: 21 December 2020 Authors: Nasima Begum,