A strategic model for Stroud District’s Community Hubs has the potential to create an inclusive and resilient district-wide network that is fit for both current purpose and perma-crisis, and an uncertain future with sudden shocks and unknown challenges.
The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns from March 2020 spurred a remarkable response from local communities to find immediate and innovative ways to support one another and tackle the challenges they faced. Local organisations, neighbours and community leaders galvanised to form mutual aid groups, community hubs and street to street care initiatives emerged overnight, challenging the concept of reliance on the public sector and redefining the role of community in the 21st century. Recognising the urgent need for a strategic approach that would sustain a stretched community sector and leave nobody behind, Creative Sustainability began to explore what a resilient system for Stroud District looks like.
Using our five community development principles – user-led, asset based, inclusive, real world and ongoing – we have been working with many and multi-sector partners to design and establish the underpinning support needed for a well-resourced and connected system of hubs, so they can meet the many different needs and purposes of their communities as they see fit. With better health and well-being for all people and communities at the heart, the system can support climate adaptation, food resilience programmes, address the cost-of living crisis, and foster stronger, more cohesive neighbourhoods. Hubs can support the day to day needs and wants of marginalised and isolated people, refugees and asylum seekers, disabled and older people, families and young people. The system generates local jobs, opportunities and investment in places that most need it, by default.
This theory of change is the accumulation of four years of pre and post covid learning at Creative Sustainability, bringing together the collective knowledge and learning of many people and organisations. It describes what resilience looks like for communities in the Stroud District and what we need to do to get there. Funders, community leaders, public and community sector organisations can use this model to engage in discussions and devise approaches that support our Stroud District communities in these uncertain times.
View the Theory of Change document