Learning across divides: bringing neighbourhoods together to work more effectively against social isolation in “Connect”
Michael Robert’s blog shares how the Connect project is enabling community-driven solutions to social isolation.
In Connect, we’re trying to do something different to address social isolation in Barking and Dagenham. Working with nine other BD Collective members across the borough, and funded by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) we’re looking to bring residents, the VCSE sector and the local authority together around a collective vision of a connected borough, in a project where experimentation and cross-sector learning are the norm.
No one person, organisation or sector can understand everything that shapes our social health. From our housing situation, to our family history, to the safety of our streets, the list of factors that determine whether we end up socially isolated or lonely is enormous.
We think that it’s by bringing people into conversation to explore how these factors interact and show up for individuals that we can have the best chance of moving things in a helpful and sustainable direction.
This means we’re thinking holistically around the environment that exists around people who are isolated. It means asking: how might we plug people into, and draw around them, the right things to spark friendships and maintain connections that will outlast the Connect programme?
These ingredients will be different for each person, they might change over time, and they won’t be something that any one person can just engineer into existence on their own.
Within our core learning community at Connect, our partners Humourisk, Harmony House, and the Independent Living Agency are forming one-to-one relationships with people who are referred into the project, and they are working together with residents to surface what matters to them. However, we’re seeing that some of these things can’t be brought to life without drawing upon other people and organisations in the community.
For instance, we might be well placed to help residents get to know their neighbours, or to help them build confidence to get out on their own. But what if they’re so ashamed at the condition of their house that they don’t want to invite anyone else in? What if they have agoraphobia and need specialist support, or are facing eviction from their home? In these cases, we need the ability to swiftly bring the broader community around a person.
Because of this, we are creating opportunities for different individuals, organisations and sectors in the borough to talk to, learn from and call upon one another, when they might be more used to operating apart.
We’re asking:
- How do we create opportunities for everyone to contribute towards shaping friendly neighbourhoods and a culture which invites people in to do that?
- How do we build our community’s ability to act together, and draw in the right skills or the right people around someone at the right time?
- What kind of things need to be present in a borough, so we have the right things to call upon and bring around people?
To explore these questions, we’ve formed two extra learning communities recently:
- “Neighbourhoods” team sessions are bringing together grassroots VCSEs to explore the ingredients and the relationships that make a neighbourhood conducive to friendship and connection.
- “Connecting the Dots” sessions are bringing together professionals from different local service teams, with those working 1:1, to explore individual stories of residents who’ve struggled to engage local services productively and feel stuck in low-impact interactions.
A central feature of both of these groups is not merely learning, but sharing learning between people having different conversations, so we can identify how to work together more effectively.
Neighbourhoods learning:
Organisations in our Neighbourhoods sessions are exploring a range of questions that have emerged from Connect organisations working in one-to-one relationships with residents. These touch on some of the key conditions for a friendly and connected borough:
- How do we create spaces where people leave feeling better than they arrived?
- How do we create activities with magnetic pull that keep people coming back?
- How do we create spaces that recognise and encourage people’s desire to contribute?
One Neighbourhoods group explored the second question about magnetic pull by creating a short film of people’s entrances and exits to their “Shedlife” meetings, and asking people to share what it is that makes them keep coming back. Below you can see the creative results of this, which we all watched at a recent learning get-together.
Each of the Neighbourhoods teams is also prototyping small new ideas, using a participatory grantmaking process, to help them explore these questions over time, and refine how they engage their communities. These organisations are:
In a recent meeting that brought together Neighbourhoods organisations with those working one-to-one in Connect (which will be our new normal, for learning) those working one-to-one with residents were able to learn more about broader activity in the borough, and organisations who may be better placed, or have more time, to engage isolated residents around particular things that matter to them. They also learned how keen the Neighbourhoods teams are to make this happen and be called upon!
By bringing different VCSE organisations together, learning is happening in multiple directions, and organisations that once worked independently are working in ways that complement one another.
“Connecting the Dots”
Since December we have also been running “Connect the Dots” sessions, which are bringing local authority teams and VCSE organisations together to explore individual stories of people who’ve got lost in low-impact service responses, and identifying ways to pull the right support around people, and better collaborate with the VCSE sector to enable this.
Based on our first session, we’ve seen how these may help local service teams to:
- Get back in touch with the real people they got into their roles to support
- Better understand the big picture behind a resident’s problems, when they might only see one aspect of a resident’s behaviour or life.
- See where they might benefit from sharing knowledge and collaborating with other service teams
- Understand how they might come together with VCSEs around challenges, when they can’t tackle them alone.
We also saw learning in the other direction. When exploring the story of a resident who has experienced long-term antisocial behaviour from neighbours, we heard about the need to think more carefully about documenting problems when working 1:1 alongside residents, building evidence with them to support their story, and cultivating a questioning and curious culture that enables us to get underneath a resident’s perceptions and into facts that will enable service or system blockages to be worked through.
What’s next?
We’re trying to ramp up the amount of cross-sector learning and collaborative action that’s happening in Connect in 2025.
Last week, we had a meeting to kick off the year and identify a range of things we want to experiment with doing differently. This includes:
- Building a common language between everyone involved in the project, so it’s easier to bring communities around challenges
- Testing a participatory grant-making approach which shifts power, so that decisions about money are made by the community who are equipped and enabled to bring changes.
- Using a prototyping approach to develop local approaches to supporting friendlier neighbourhoods – we want to test, learn, change things, then test again, embracing failure as something that can catapult us to better ideas.
We’ll share more about these in our next blog. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you:
- How have you been able to bring communities around problems in creative ways to tackle big or thorny problems?
- How are you effectively sharing learning between people who are usually apart?
- How are you helping people to act on this learning, by experimenting with new approaches?
- What are you most interested in hearing about from Connect in future blogs?
Share your thoughts with us at theteam@carecity.org
