Support Staffordshire
CASE STUDY
COMMUNITY HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENT
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Support Staffordshire is the VCSE infrastructure organisation for Staffordshire. As well as supporting community and voluntary groups in their work by providing information, advice and guidance, they work in cross sector partnerships based around health (including health inequalities and social prescribing), community resilience, and environment/climate change.
They have a strong understanding of the existing health inequalities in Staffordshire, which occur mostly in the most deprived and most diverse communities including Cannock, Stoke on Trent and Burton on Trent, and have dedicated projects to help drive systemic change to tackle these in the most affected areas.
Support Staffordshire “take an asset based approach in all of our work, putting local communities at the forefront of everything we do”
The horizon of Stoke on Trent, a city that Support Staffordshire work within
CONTEXT
Joining the programme was relevant to two newer streams of work: building community resilience to emergency situations, and developing a Green Network to support community based climate action work, including creating a shared vision for the future to guide decision making with regards to sustainability. In applying to the course, they said that they “know from this work that communities in Staffordshire want support in advocating for themselves at the council and decision making level, and this programme will help us to develop our staff skillset in order to better provide this support.”
ACTIVITIES
4 workshops were held with two specialist groups Support Staffordshire wanted to engage in the programme. The aim of the workshops was to provide a space for communities to talk about health in a way which is meaningful to them, allowing the connections between the interlinking social determinants of health to be recognised (for example, employment, housing, transportation, food), as well as exploring the impacts of climate change on health.
Two groups were approached to be a part of this project, Burton Women’s Collective and the Neurodivergent community in Lichfield and Tamworth, with 2 x 2 hour evening workshops organised for each group. The workshops were not openly advertised to the public, as it was felt that the conversation would flow better if the participants were familiar with each other or knew that the other attendees in the workshop had similar lived experiences. These groups were approached due to their existing relationships with Support Staffordshire staff via the ‘Healthy Communities Alliance’ in South East Staffordshire.
LEARNINGS
Attendance was high and consistent for both groups (10 per workshop for Burton, 7 per workshop for Lichfield). This is highly likely due to the existing trusted relationships that the groups had with Support Staffordshire staff, which gave participants confidence that their needs would be met, and that the workshops would be a safe space where they could express their views openly and be listened to and understood by their peers.
One of the most powerful learning moments came at the very end of the final session with the neurodivergent community. When asked if they would have attended these sessions if it had been an open invite to the public, the answer was a unanimous ‘no’ , with reasons being that they felt they would be talked over or not understood. This demonstrates the importance of holding specific peer workshops with different audiences to gain a truly diverse variety of perspectives on intersecting topics such as health and climate.
Each group asked what would be done with the information gathered from these workshops, and the question was put back to them – what did they want to happen next? The answer came that they wanted the conversations to be shared widely, for the learnings and points raised to be used in other work and projects for the benefit of everyone. The conversations were powerful and meaningful, and they shouldn’t be forgotten or left behind in meeting rooms and in unread reports.
OUTPUTS
Two beautiful outputs were artist posters to be shared across local authority and VCSE spaces.:
An artists representation of people’s reflections from a workshop with a local women’s support network
The artists representation of reflections from workshop participants who are part of a local neurodivergent community group
OUTCOME
A summary document of the key insights were prepared by the Support Staffordshire team and have been included in preparatory notes for Local Authority project directors approaching new funded works, such as large scale urban projects or climate change related infrastructure projects. For Support Staffordshire this was a clear way in ensuring that elected officials and politicians address community health issues at the beginning of projects. This is a case of endeavouring to alter the behaviours in how politics and political institutions influence population health outcomes.
“The richness of the discussion and the vulnerability that people showed through the stories they told and personal insight they gave, came through in the copious notes recorded at the workshops. It was clear after the sessions that Health and Climate intersected the lives of people and they demonstrated this with multiple examples from their everyday lives. Co-production is often modelled, but sometimes lacks a true application, building on already existing trusted relationships made the space for these fantastic discussions and sharing.”
- James Flintham, supporting the Lichfield and Tamworth neurodivergent community