Place Based Social Action Programme
This series brings together all documents and information relating to the Place Based Social Action programme.
Background
The Place Based Social Action (PBSA) Programme is jointly funder by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) and The National Lottery Community Fund. It provides around £4.5M of funding up until December 2024.
The funding will create positive change by enabling people, communities, local non-statutory organisations and the statutory sector to work collaboratively to create a shared vision for the future of their place, and address local priorities through social action.
The programme will support The National Lottery Community Fund’s commitment to supporting communities to flourish by delivering the change they want to see locally. It will also support DCMS’ commitment to enable and build demand for social action to become routine in communities, and in public service design and delivery.
Social action is about people coming together to help improve their lives and solve the problems that are important in their communities. It involves people giving their time and other resources for the common good. This can be in a range of forms, from volunteering and community owned services, to simple neighbourly acts.
We have commissioned an evaluation and learning contract to Renaisi to generate learning, provide capability and capacity building to support funded organisations and enable them to use our funding to improve practice, drive organisational capacity and become sustainable after funding ends.
A support and development contract for the programme is provided by Locality, along with the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and Co-operatives UK (Co-ops UK) over the first four years of the programme.
Programme delivery
Over a one year period in 2018, our contractors worked with 20 partnerships to help create a shared vision and plan setting out how high impact social action can help respond to local priorities. This was an opportunity for partnerships to receive one years’ worth of support to build and establish trusted networks locally, develop local capacity and capability, and identify potential social action opportunities.
In early 2019, based on the strength and ambition of the plans, 10 partnerships were awarded a grant of up to £240,000 over a three year period to implement their social action plan. The support and development contractors will remain in place to deliver a bespoke package to each partnership.
The ten successful partnerships are based in the following areas, with the lead partner organisation in bold:
- Onion Collective CIC (Watchet)
- Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership (Bristol)
- Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire (Coventry)
- Safe Regeneration (Sefton)
- North East Lincolnshire VCSE Alliance (North East Lincolnshire)
- Halifax Opportunities Trust (Calderdale)
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation (Hartlepool)
- Lincoln City FC Sport & Education Trust (Lincoln)
- Volunteer Centre Hackney (Hackney)
- Community360 (Colchester)
Learning Review
Renaisi, our learning and evaluation partners, have written the following Learning Review. It is designed to bring together existing evidence of practice in this field to guide and support the work of both the evaluation, and the partnerships delivering the programme.
The learning objectives of this review are:
- to provide an understanding of existing approaches supporting and measuring place based social action, and to consider the merits and limitations of these approaches. This will help inform our approach to evaluation and learning.
- to give a focus to the challenges/difficulties of demonstrating the impact of PBSA initiatives.
- to provide an opportunity to begin to consider some of the broad, programme questions we hope to be able to answer over the next seven years.
Phase 1 Evaluation Report
Renaisi have published the following report presenting the early experiences and reflections of the partnerships, the funders (DCMS and The National Lottery Community Fund) and support providers involved in Phase 1 of the PBSA programme. It provides an overview of the first year for those who were directly involved, and for others working on similar approaches who might be interested in early learning that has arisen from the programme.
The report covers:
- how the PBSA programme operates
- an introduction to the partnerships involved
- what happened in Phase 1
- approaches to learning and understanding PBSA
- reflections on programme design
- next steps and how learning from Phase 1 is being applied to Phase 2