To create of cohort of community champions in three sub-wards of innercity Southampton.
• Design a rewarding and engaging community champions scheme- through consultation with individual residents and local community groups such as the Women’s Integration Group, Southampton Stronger Communities Team, Solent NHS Trust and The United Voices of Africa Association (all partners of Homegrown SO14) we will co-design a community champion scheme to recognise and fund local community champions who are using creative practice and community action to improve public health in the area.
• Create and deliver a community engagement strategy for the scheme – Once the scheme is co-designed, we will roll out a comprehensive community engagement strategy using our community partners and which will include door-to-door engagement, digital engagement through existing Whatsapp groups, and publicity at neighbourhood events. We will also engage the area’s places of worship to promote the scheme, including Lighthouse Church, Medina Mosque, the Vedic Temple, and the Singh Sabha Gurdwara.
• Appoint community champions– We will appoint community champions through a simple digital and analogue (paper based) application process which will be circulated through our community engagement process.
• Support champions to scale and build activity – We will provide all champions free access to Social Impact Lab social change resources, including videos and worksheets, and support to evidence the social impact of their work with a view to securing additional external funding.
• Connect Community Champions with UoS students - Our cohort of champions will be invited on to campus to meet with our 2022 Social Impact Lab Fellowship cohort (20 students) with the intention of skills exchange and mutual collaboration. Our intention is to support our champions to engage with and feel a sense of belonging to the University at large.
Local economy – our sub wards have the city average of post-school qualifications but double the unemployment rate (across all age groups, Southampton Data Observatory, 2022). Our community champions scheme will mirror the skills development focus of our Social Impact Lab Fellowship, with an emphasis on transferable skills to boost employability. Reduction in underserved groups – As health data indicates, our 3 sub-wards suffer from poor health outcomes linked to underservice and neglect. By supporting and funding creative and community projects for public health, we hope to see an improvement in these areas, and the prospective objective of policy literacy and advocacy will serve to enhance residents’ involvement in local policy-making. Improvements in public health – Over time we hope to see an enhancement in public health, linked to better community engagement in policymaking and the scaling of community creative and community action projects.
1) Community Champions Scheme - appointing a cohort of 10 community champions with seed funding to scale and build their creative practice and community action for public
health.
2) Evaluative report – we will write an evaluative report based on feedback from our champions on the outcomes of the project, which will be based on 1) the development of
skills and capital areas for our champions, evidenced through baseline and exit surveys; 2) the social impact of their projects; 3) feedback from our community partners on the equity, engagement, and effectiveness of our co-design process.
3) Celebration event – we will hold a celebration event at the end of our programme in May 2023 (funded by the Homegrown SO14 budget) to recognise and thank our champions and our community partners, and to present our main findings in an engaging forma.
Homegrown SO14 is a spin-out programme of the University’s Social Impact Lab. It is designed to work with residents and community groups in three sub-wards of SO14 (Northam, Newtown, and St Mary’s) to cultivate creative practice and community action for public health. The project is part of the University’s Biomedical Research Centre (2022-27) and the Pathways to Health through Cultures of Neighbourhoods (2022-23). These three sub-wards are among the most deprived in Southampton (Southampton Data Observatory, 2019). Bevois ward has by some distance some of the worst health outcomes in the city, including male life expectancy, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and the number of households with chronic health conditions Southampton Data Observatory, 2019). We are seeking funding to launch the next phase of HGSO14: recruiting a cohort of community champions to recognise and encourage existing neighbourhood-level creative practice and community action. We plan to appoint 10 champions with the support of community groups to ensure as representative and diverse a cohort as possible. Our champions will also serve as ambassadors for HGSO14, helping to engage community members in demographic groups which are typically excluded and under-served in the area (young people 13-21, working-age men from all ethnic backgrounds (Saints Foundation 2019; NEF, 2016). At present, there is no scheme to do so in the local area, and from our activities to date we are aware that there without recognition or funding, constraints on residents (including childcare, care of elders, and paid work) will limit future activities. Our project will contribute to the University’s Civic Strategic Plan, particularly the themes of “Place”, (local civic action in inner city Southampton) “Health and Wellbeing” and “Social Justice and Equality”. This next phase of HGSO14 will lay the foundations for our third phase, which will leverage data-led creative practice and community action to support local public policy advocacy, following the principles of asset-based community engagement (Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) Harrison et al 2019; Ganz, 2002, 2011).
Our partner organisations will be vital in helping to designing our community champions scheme, as well as designing and delivering our community engagement strategy and our evaluation stage where we will be seeking feedback not only on our outcomes but also on our process.
SDG1 - No Poverty; SDG3 - Good Health and Well-Being; SDG8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth; SDG10 - Reduced Inequalities; SDG11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities; SDG17 - Partnerships For the Goals.
Project Lead: Pathik Pathak