Healthy communities

Our communities, both in terms of the geographical area where we live, and the people who share interests or identities with us, have an important influence on health and wellbeing throughout our lives. Communities that have control and influence over the decisions that affect them are likely to have more positive health and social outcomes than those whose voices are seldom heard.

Healthy communities

Our work is focused on building knowledge and improving approaches to engaging, enabling and empowering communities to be the focus of, and mechanism for, appropriate and relevant change.  The projects described in this section seek to build knowledge or develop practice that gives strength to the voices, and power to the views, of different communities on a range of issues, all with a view to improving health and wellbeing, and reducing inequalities in the long term.

We know that the physical characteristics of places and communities, for example housing, local amenities and greenspace, are also important for health and wellbeing. Our work which focuses on these more physical aspects of places can be found under Places and regeneration.