The neighbourhood challenge

This UK report looks at how communities can lead meaningful change in their neighbourhoods? What approaches to stimulating and supporting community-led action work best in different areas? How can government and funders catalyse locally-led innovation in a way that achieves impact at any kind of scale?   These are some of the questions that we are trying to answer through the Neighbourhood Challenge, learning from the practical experience of 17 community organisations across England that are testing new ways to galvanize and support local people to take action in their neighbourhoods. In 2008 NESTA ran the Big Green Challenge, at the time, the world’s first social Challenge Prize demonstrating that with the right incentives and support communities could be the source of radical new solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The Big Lottery Fund’s Village SOS has shown that communities have incredible and often untapped capacity that can be unleashed through a carefully designed intervention. These are new ways of funding community action that unlock the assets and creative potential that exist in all communities. We started with a simple shared assumption: that equipped with the right skills, practical tools and small, catalytic amounts of money, community organisations can also unlock that hidden potential and galvanise people to work together to create innovative responses to local priorities. We wanted to use practical examples to test this assumption, creating new insights into the skills, tools, finance and support that would beneeded, and learning about the system-level changes necessary to have impact at scale. Of course, this is what many of the best community organisations have been doing for a very long time. In the  UK and across the world there are well established traditions of community organising, community development and other disciplines that aim to unlock the potential of people. What isnew is the scale of the challenges facing local communities and public services, alongside a commitment from the government to support civil society and activism. We also know that too many funding programmes unintentionally quash the potential for innovation. At a time when so much reform effort is focused on localism, there is an urgent demand for knowledge and learning about what works in practice, particularly when it comes to areas with low levels of social capital, which are perhaps at the greatest risk of being left behind. We’re already starting to develop some insights into how more networked and transparent forms of reporting and accountability, peer-to-peer support, access to specialist help, and flexible, iterative design processes can enable experimentation and allow for failure without stigmatising it. Over the next year, we’ll be working hard to support the 17 community organisations and make sure that we share what we’re learning as widely as possible