Neighbourhood Challenge

Neighbourhood Challenge: Seventeen stories begin

17.08.2011

The Neighbourhood Challenge is a programme from NESTA and the Big Lottery Fund which is supporting 17 community organisations across England to trial their approach to galvanizing and supporting community led innovation.

Today, I am really pleased to be able to share a new publication with you that represents the starting point for each of the Neighbourhood Challenge projects on their own particular journey through the programme. This is very much the beginning of the story for all of the groups and for the programme team too; as we will be working closely with all 17 groups to learn directly from their experiences of putting plans for community led innovation into action. I hope that we will be able to find out more about how funders of all kinds can support communities to lead innovative projects most effectively, and what works in local neighbourhoods to galvanize action on the ground.

In this paper you will be able to read about the range of different approaches that have now begun to take root in the neighbourhoods involved. Methods being trialled include community organising, local challenge prizes, social enterprise, skills sharing and community match funding amongst others. There is also a diversity in terms of the types of areas in which groups are working, from urban inner city streets to small rural villages; and groups come from right across England as you can see on our map.

View Neighbourhood Challenge projects in a larger map

One of the ambitions of the programme as a whole is to open up the ongoing stories from the groups themselves to make reporting information more visible and useful to others who might be interested in finding out about or supporting their projects. To make this work in practice, we have asked groups to keep an online diary instead of sending monitoring reports to NESTA; so after reading the descriptions in the paper, you can read more live and in-depth updates directly from projects themselves.