Launching our five-year, £15m investment
We also launched our five-year £15m Community Investment strategy – our commitment to creating thriving communities.
We want to make sure we’re driving change where it’s needed most. And that we’re tackling the big issues – health and wellbeing, employment opportunities, anti-social behaviour, homelessness. Instead of spreading ourselves too thinly, we carried out research to identify key communities that’ll benefit most from our support. So, we’re focusing on eight Community Investment Zones.
These zones reflect the communities where many of our customers face some of today’s most challenging issues. We’re focusing on key neighbourhoods and have developed 13 Community Investment Plans (CIPs) with a flexible response to emerging needs.
We know that our customers and communities know what’s best for them. Which is why we worked with each key neighbourhood on an individual basis to develop their CIP. It was clear that health and wellbeing, employment, and community empowerment were important areas they wanted support in. And these areas link directly with our central mission – to create thriving communities and empower lives. So, that’s what our investment is focusing on.
To support the delivery of our strategy we have established or developed existing partnerships. We believe that working in partnership with local community groups, customers, statutory bodies will enable us to support sustainable change, community resilience and improve people’s lives chances.
In the financial year 2020/21, we have made significant progress, with partnership consortiums set up in seven (out of eight) Community Investment Zones. The partnerships reflect our ‘hyper-local’ approach to carrying out our work.
