A strategy and a tool: building a multi-pronged approach to help Greenwich Council assess community needs and resources
The Royal Borough of Greenwich features great cultural diversity, a strong voluntary and community sector and a host of community assets and resources. Greenwich is also a borough that has seen significant changes in the last 10 years, including a population increase of 13.6% between 2011 and 2021, the 5th largest increase in population of any London borough. This trend is set to continue, with the most significant increases in population likely to be seen in Peninsula and Woolwich Riverside wards.
The broader macroeconomic context is characterised by a distinct uncertainty and instability. The Council has been grappling with the twin challenges of public spending cuts and increased demand for public services, alongside societal challenges including climate change and migration, resulting in the need for greater efficiencies, collaboration and innovation.
In 2023, we spoke with the RBG Communities team, who needed a better way to assess need and provision of services, and a strategy to enable it to allocate its Council owned community assets (including community centres, libraries and leisure centres) in the way that could better enable the voluntary and community sector, and in turn Greenwich residents, to thrive.
We wrote about our co-design process in an earlier blog, reflecting on the halfway point of the project. Now we’re at the point of delivery - we’ve done the interviews, the workshops, the synthesis, the analysis, the feedback loops and the (always difficult) editing. Looking back at where we were, we’re so grateful to all the people who taught us so much about Greenwich, and put us in the position to produce a strategy that, we hope, can really build towards a brighter future for everyone.
So what did we observe and learn during this 10-month process?
How incredibly complex the system really is
Council staff and elected members, VCS groups and residents provided us with an incredible richness and depth of insights that is so hard to synthesise into a 60-page report, let alone into a more digestible format. A report can’t really encapsulate some of the less tangible aspects, like the importance of those individuals - the “Pats, Mimis, Michaels, Rowans, Anguses” - who are often the lynchpin of a community. So we’ve ended up providing the Council with extra tools and resources that try to bring some of that extra richness to life.
At the same time, it is impossible to provide solutions to every challenge that has been presented to us, and we’ve had to work hard to consistently remember where the boundaries of our influence lie within the system . In this environment of shrinking local authority budgets, an increasing cost of living and more stretched social care provision, no strategy can provide the magic money tree that sometimes feels like the only answer to these challenging issues. Indeed, no strategy should even try to suggest that each brilliant local initiative out there should be funded - not because those initiatives aren’t great, but because it’s simply not possible.
Moreover, looking at funding pots and asset allocation in that individualised way fails to allow for more holistic ecosystem support. Assessing where communities have specific needs, where they have specific strengths, where there are gaps and where there is plenty - this is where local authorities can play an incredibly important facilitating and connecting role. Enabling a children’s nursery to be used in the evenings for an art class that is accessible to those with disabilities, or providing a regular transport for people in one ward to access much-needed healthcare that’s only available in the next ward along - it’s this kind of network creation that allows a voluntary and community sector, and the community itself, to become more than the sum of its parts.
How often we reinvent the wheel
As we’ve engaged with VCS organisations across Greenwich, it’s been incredibly exciting to see the initiatives that are already ongoing and that can be built upon. There are the higher-level working groups and co-design committees, sitting alongside very targeted services for specific community groups, sitting alongside community centres who do their best to bring all these passionate people together.
But it can sometimes be disheartening to see just how much activity is going on, with such potential, that is too often being duplicated or going unnoticed. Too often, this is simply because of poor communication, and data management. We’ve come back to this time and time again during our research - the importance of having a centralised database within one local authority, that is shared transparently with all the VCS organisations doing great work, cannot be underestimated. If people know what’s going on, and can lean on and learn from one another, a seemingly simple database can be incredibly transformative for a community. For example, Ealing Council built a community asset and research consortium through the Living Roots Project, to address health equity. This partnership came about in response to the pandemic, and creates partnerships between health and social care organisations, local authorities, and the VCS sector, with the intention of building on an existing programme of assets.
How quickly things change
Part of the reason for building this Community Resource Strategy was to provide the Council with an up-to-date analysis of needs and VCS activity in the borough. This kind of data collection hadn’t been carried out for some time within Greenwich. But the challenge for us, as for all local authorities, was that almost as soon as we wrapped up our needs analysis (May-December 2023), it needed to be updated again.
The population in Greenwich is changing, not least because of transient and working age populations who move around a lot in the borough. And the community is constantly seeing the emergence of new projects and closure of longstanding institutions. This means that decisions made on the basis of this needs analysis will almost certainly be less pertinent in two or three years time.
That’s why we built a tool that RBG staff can use to keep their understanding of the borough more current. Our Greenwich Needs Analysis Tool provides a snapshot of the borough at present, a ranking of the wards by deprivation, and a visual interpretation of the current location of key community assets and VCS organisations. It also gives the Council the opportunity to update key stats and figures, like demographic data, deprivation metrics, and the existence (or closure) of community assets in the area - which means the analysis of where to allocate resources can be ongoing, consistent, and regularly updated.
We hope that this tool can be one of the most useful outputs we’re providing to the Royal Borough of Greenwich, since it should help to keep their understanding of the community alive in a way that a strategy, no matter how ambitious, can never achieve.
Over the last ten months, I’ve learnt more about Greenwich than I’ve ever known about the area of London I’ve lived in for the last 10 years - and yet I know I have only scratched the surface. I hope that our strategy can be one part of a bigger puzzle to support a thriving VCS sector and we are so excited to see how the borough develops over the next few years.
