Mobilising Community Assets - Phase Three

Projects funded in Phase Three were announced in February 2024 and will run for 3 years. This £25 million funding opportunity was co-developed by AHRC with colleagues across UKRI, the NCCH, and other relevant stakeholders.

The 12 funded projects in Phase Three seek to tackle entrenched and long-standing health inequalities in Britain’s poorest communities by exploring how health systems can collaborate more effectively with communities. Some of the projects will explore ways of addressing health inequalities in rural and coastal communities. Others will be focused on tackling systems change to support specific communities.

Phase Three Projects:

• Creative Health Boards: a new model for embedding creative health and community assets in health systems across the UK (Led by: Professor Christopher Dayson, Sheffield Hallam University) - The project aims to create a new model for integrating art, culture and other creative activities in health and care services (Creative Health Boards). The project aims to set up six new creative health boards across the UK which will allow arts, culture and creativity to be more easily accessed by people at most risk of poor health.

• National partnership to tackle health inequalities in coastal communities (Led by: Dr Barbara Mezes, University of Liverpool, and Dr Lucy Selman, University of Bristol) - Focusing on three different coastal towns – Blackpool, Weston-super-Mare and Hastings – this project will bring together the NHS, local authorities, researchers, voluntary and community organisations and residents to see how greater collaboration can tackle health inequalities.

• Arts4Us - Working together to scale up place-based arts initiatives that support the mental health of children and young people (Led by: Professor Vicky Karkou, Edge Hill University) - The project will focus on the mental health of young people aged nine to 13, creating an easy to use digital platform where evidence-based local arts activities can be made accessible for children and young people, their families and relevant organisations and services.

• Co-Producing Integrated Place-based Supports To Enable Healthy Ageing-in-Place For Roma Communities (Led by: Professor Ryan Woolrych, Heriot-Watt University) - Roma groups experience some of the poorest health and wellbeing outcomes across society. This project aims to identify how community assets can support healthy ageing for Roma communities, aimed at reducing health inequities in middle to later life.

• Co-creating asset and place-based approaches to tackling refugee and migrant health exclusion (Led by: Professor Margaret Greenfields, Anglia Ruskin University) - Refugees, asylum seekers and migrants can experience poor health caused by a variety of factors such as language barriers, employment, education and poverty. The project will explore how community assets can be used to improve health, wellbeing and social support which addresses these factors.

• Challenging Health Outcomes/Integrating Care Environments (CHOICE) Ph3: A Community Consortium to Tackle Health Disparity for People Living with Mental Illness (Led by: Professor Gerard Leavey, University of Ulster) - People with severe mental illness face profound social exclusion. They also die much younger than the general population from preventable causes. CHOICE will establish a new model providing inter-agency collaboration and capacity at community-level.

• ReCITE: Building Research by Communities to Address Inequities Through Expression (Led by: Professor Miriam Taegtmeyer, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) - Storytelling can be utilised as a way of collecting data, highlighting inequities to policymakers, providing health messages to communities and redirecting public agendas to better promote health equity. This project will explore how storytelling can be better integrated into community and health systems to address gaps in care and promote health equity.

• Rural co-design and collaboration: maximising rural community assets to reduce place-based health inequalities (Led by: Dr Sara Bradley, University of South Wales) - Community-based services like exercise groups, outdoor activities, art therapies and peer support are increasingly being ‘prescribed’ to address mental health conditions, sedentary lifestyles and health inequalities. This project aims to maximise the use of local assets such as museums, libraries and green spaces to promote health and wellbeing and to reduce health inequalities.

• Making every community asset count: improving health and reducing inequalities for people experiencing homelessness (Led by Dr Christina Cooper and Professor Monique Lhussier, Northumbria University) - Co-led by people with experience of homelessness, this project aims to understand the impact of trauma on everyday functioning, and how creative approaches might help with this. The researchers will develop a network of care services including creative health approaches, use creative approaches to challenge stigma around homelessness, and determine how services can work effectively together to prevent and tackle homelessness.

• Tackling health inequalities with and for the Deaf British Sign Language-using Communities in Wales (Led by: Dr Christopher Shank, Bangor University) - The project aims to design, implement and evaluate Deaf community-led solutions for known health inequities and inequalities facing Deaf people using British Sign Language (BSL) in Wales.

• The Abundance Project: Enhancing Cultural and Green Inclusion in Social Prescribing in Southwest London to Address Ethnic Inequalities in Mental Health (Led by: Professor Maria Chatzichristodoulou, University of the Arts London and Professor Tushna Vandrevala, Kingston University) - Black, ethnic minority and refugee communities who live in poorer south west London boroughs and other cities across the UK are at the greatest risk of poor mental health, yet are least likely to engage with cultural and green community assets or social prescribing. The project aims to develop ways for these communities to engage with assets such as galleries, museums, natural spaces and community groups and benefit from them.

• REALITIES in Health Disparities: Researching Evidence-based Alternatives in Living, Imaginative, Traumatised, Integrated, Embodied Systems (Led by: Dr Marisa de Andrade, University of Edinburgh) - This project will explore how changes to health and social care systems can benefit deprived communities, and people with experience of trauma, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, displacement, poor mental health or imprisonment. Their work includes understanding what is needed to build systems that create health and wellbeing.