Rapid Research COVID-19 Briefing #2: Community resilience or resourcefulness?

One pandemic, many responses

Published: 2022

This is the third report from Local Trust’s research study exploring how 26 communities across England responded to the COVID-19 crisis.

It follows Strong than anyone thought, published in September 2020, which looked at the initial lockdown period and Now they see us, published in August 2021, which saw the communities adapting to a…

Helping community businesses be more resilient – Lessons learnt from the Trade Up programme

Published: 2022

One of Power to Change’s three strategic priorities for 2021-2025 is ‘more resilient community businesses’. This paper explores whether the Trade Up programme – designed to support the growth of community businesses and being delivered between May 2017 to March 2022 – made community businesses more resilient. Findings show that while diff…

The Power of Community: Learning from Bristol’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic

Published: 2022

During 2021, Voscur worked with academics and students from the University of Bristol to investigate how the sector had adapted to ensure delivery of vital services during Covid-19.

With many in our sector unable to deliver vital services by established means, we wanted to find out how our colleagues from across the sector had continued to ful…

Rapid research COVID-19 Briefing #16: Community responses to COVID-19 – Connecting communities? How relationships have mattered in community responses to COVID-19

Published: 2022

This briefing, the 16th in a series seeking to understand how communities across England respond to COVID-19 and how they recover, explores the importance of ‘relational working’. It argues that approaches which rely on relationships to work, but also pay attention to the importance of relationships to the people that community groups …

Understanding local patterns of volunteer activity during COVID-19

Published: 2021

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport commissioned The Young Foundation to undertake an initial scoping study to identify some of the ways in which volunteers were mobilised at local levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the research was:

to identify some of the ways in which volunteer groups operated and develo…

Empowering Places – Change Framework

Published: 2021

This is a working ‘change framework’ for the Empowering Places programme – a five-year programme designed to empower communities to build community businesses. The framework sets out the desired vision and outcomes of the programme, as well as pointing to the elements of the programme that enable progress towards the vision and outcomes. …

Understanding vaccine hesitancy through communities of place

Published: 2021

A new UK-US collaborative study examining vaccine engagement highlights the importance of tapping into local knowledge and leadership in efforts to improve Covid-19 vaccine take-up.

The research was funded by the British Academy, the Social Science Research Council, and the UK’s Science and Innovation Network in the&…

Rapid research COVID-19 Briefing #15: Community responses to COVID-19 – Changing community needs and looking to the future

Published: 2021

The pandemic has been accompanied by a searching analysis of its multi-faceted challenges, uneven consequences and intensifying social needs. Looking ahead, it is thought that a ‘long shadow’ of impact will be cast over the coming ‘COVID decade’. But how are needs experienced at community level identified and understood? This briefing a…

Rapid research COVID-19 Briefing #14: Community responses to COVID-19 – Sustaining community action

Published: 2021

There is a growing body of evidence on how communities have responded to COVID-19, highlighting an early surge in community action and the subsequent power of communities to meet the needs of residents during crises. More recently, however, as the pandemic has continued longer than anyone imagined, there is increasing evidence pointing towards …