“Community resilience is a measure of the sustained ability of a community to utilise available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations.”[1]
The Releasing Community Capacity Programme (RCC) has been set up by the Health and Wellbeing Board as the single vehicle to release community capacity and by doing so to improve community resilience as safer and stronger, more cohesive communities are proven to be better able to tackle ill health and deprivation.
The RCC programme is a true commitment from the council, NHS and third sector to build upon what already exists in communities encouraging and supporting people to become active citizens and play a greater role in their community at the same time as creating a platform for communities to identify issues and to work to tackle them. £150,000has been invested by the Health and Wellbeing Board to support community-level action that strengthens social capital and tackles these issues.
People in challenged and underserved communities are well aware of what is wrong with the community and don’t need to be reminded. What they do need is to be shown that their community has ‘good’ people and ‘good’ places to help enhance their lives[2]. The RCC programme works across two levels:
- Emphasis on self-care, community level support and signposting to stimulate activity in the community at no or low cost through an assets based approach.
- Changing the traditional culture within existing service providers (statutory and/or non-statutory) to recognise the contribution the community can make – co-production.
These are achieved by a series of interventions which include a three tier training programme, one to one interventions and support to groups and organisations. As the emphasis of the health and wellbeing element of the RCC programme is on Making Every Contact Count everyone in North East Lincolnshire whether employed or not is regarded as a potential ‘Collective Workforce’. The programme has built capacity in the Collective Workforce by offering a wide range of asset-based training for everyone to identify their own skills, to refresh them, build on them and share skills and experiences, and this has been delivered by three levels of training and skill development (Figure 3).
Figure 3: shows the three tiers of development for the RCC programme
The programme has helped people to develop practical approaches and real solutions through change and improvement by supporting their development and implantation, small collaborative test ideas have been carried out for new services.
The Change Champions course was originally designed as an intensive skills development programme for key people who were currently working in community development with an aim that these participants would be active in the communities and have extensive skills in community activity. By participating on this course there would be an opportunity to update their skills within protected time to plan and develop initiatives. The Change Champions are able to bid against the £150,000 for grants of up to £10,000 and can also support other community groups who haven’t been through the Change Champion programme to set up initiatives and bid for funding. 23 applications were approved at a total cost of £120,000 and they form the results in the case studies section.
Through the RCC programme support and infrastructure has been provided to all through a range of resources, toolkits and information where people have been shown what is available locally to empower them to make health and wellbeing everyone’s responsibility. By supporting the local residents of North East Lincolnshire we have been able to measurewhat has been spent and what we have gained as a result, this is also known as Social Value and Return on Investment.
[1] www.gov.uk/guidance/resilience-in-society-infrastructure-communities-and-businesses
[2] www.discoveringstrengths.com