Professor Kevin Fenton, OHID London Regional Director says “I have closely followed the Community Chest work and am delighted to see these funding pots making a real difference to communities. Working to improve the health and wellbeing of residents whilst simultaneously connecting different groups, who may not have had the chance or opportunity to interact together before. I look forward to seeing what’s next for the Community Chest model”
December 2023 blog – Bylan Shah, Deputy Director of Transformation
TPHC Community Chest model highlighted in Department of Health and Social Care policy paper – Accelerating reform in adult social care in England: priorities for innovation and scaling
Making positive change within local communities
“The most important things about our rides, other than getting women on bikes, is bringing communities together. We had women from all communities, Muslim, Sikh, LGBTQ+, Roma, Black, Christian on our rides, who formed connections and friendships across the communities they belong to.”
– Waltham Forest Joy Riders project
In October, I was delighted to see Waltham Forest’s Community Chest featured in a new policy paper from the Department of Health and Social Care. The paper referenced two of their twelve funded projects. The Disability Resource Centre, who are running a project called ‘Belonging’, an art and creative writing project for disabled adults and adults with learning disabilities. As well as Forest Churches Emergency Night Shelter, who currently run a drop-in centre for homeless people and will launch a summer project which will involve staff and some service users getting training in co-production. The 12 community chest projects funded across Waltham Forest have seen almost 1000 residents access activities.
September 2024
New evaluation highlights success of Community Chest model in enhancing local collaboration
In an exciting new initiative to enhance community support and collaboration, TPHC has engaged Care City to conduct an independent evaluation of the Community Chest model in Tower Hamlets and Barking & Dagenham.
This evaluation spotlights the programme’s impressive success in strengthening connections between local authorities, the NHS and the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, demonstrating its significant impact on local collaboration and community well-being.
The evaluation comes at a perfect time as we are seeing greater emphasis being placed on community integration and prevention, for example through the development of the Integrated Neighbourhood Teams and the recent findings in the Darzi report, the Community Chest presents a unique enabler to realise this vision.
Coming soon