Community wellbeing

How can neighbourhoods be understood and defined?

Publication 1 August 2010

This is a review of what is and is not known about neighbourhoods and communities. It starts to analyse the characteristics of neighbourhoods, including how they are defined and the role of the local public realm in bringing them together.

Cohesive Communities

Publication 1 July 2010

This report was commissioned by Local Government Improvement and Development to investigate how local authorities and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) can work more productively together to build empowered and cohesive communities. The research took place over a period

The End of Regeneration? Improving what matters on small housing estates

Publication 1 April 2010

This toolkit aims to encourage local authorities, housing associations and other public agencies to think differently about how to break the cycle of entrenched poverty and disadvantage on small housing estates. The ideas, approaches and lessons in this toolkit are

The State of Happiness

Publication 1 February 2010

The State of Happiness brings together four years of groundbreaking work based on in-depth pilots – from teaching resilience to children in schools to promoting neighbourliness – with three councils in very different areas of the country: Manchester, Hertfordshire and

Never Again: avoiding the mistakes of the past

Publication 30 January 2010

From the projects in Paris suburbs, to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, to Broadwater Farm and Park Hill in Sheffield, high hopes and dreams have soured as, over time, ambitious new developments have become the housing of last resort for the most desperate.

Sinking and Swimming: Understanding Britain’s Unmet Needs

Publication 1 December 2009

This is a study of who is sinking and who is swimming in Britain today. Based on new analysis of statistical data, case studies, surveys and hundreds of conversations with people across the country, the study shows where the most

Civility Lost and Found

Publication 1 June 2009

Has Britain become an uncivil society? Civility Lost and Found argues that incivility has become common, whether in the behaviour of tv and radio presenters, revellers out on a Saturday night or drunks on airplanes, and that few issues matter

Mind and Matter: The importance of psychological needs for social policy

Publication 30 November 2008

This work was part of the Young Foundation’s Mapping Unmet and Emerging Needs programme. The programme brought together a coalition of more than a dozen independent foundations and funding bodies to develop new insights into how social needs in Britain

Neighbourhood Taskforces

Publication 1 October 2008

Conflict exists at all levels of society, from the most localised of settings where neighbours bicker over the height of hedges to its most extreme form, violence between nations. Tensions also exist under the surface of most communities. The root

Local Wellbeing: Can We Measure It?

Publication 30 September 2008

The concept and language of wellbeing was first introduced at the local level through the Local Government Act 2000. The Act included a new power of wellbeing, providing local authorities with the power to do whatever they consider necessary to

Understanding neighbourliness and belonging

Publication 1 September 2008

Understanding neighbourliness and belonging: A scoping paper for the Neighbourhood Action Network (published September 2008, updated in August 2010) In recent decades increased mobility, longer life expectancy, the breakdown of the extended family and an increasingly diverse and rapidly changing

Neighbourliness + Empowerment = Wellbeing: Is there a formula for happy communities?

Publication 22 June 2008

Is there a formula for happy communities? How does active citizenship contribute to the wellbeing of communities? This report, which is the first in a series of publications from the Local Wellbeing Project, tries to answer this question by investigating