Wellbeing and Community Empowerment

The Local Wellbeing Project is a three-year initiative to explore how local government can improve the happiness and wellbeing of their citizens. The project brings together three local authorities – Manchester, Hertfordshire and South Tyneside – with the Young Foundation; Professor Lord Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, who has led much of the debate about happiness and public policy; and the Improvement and Development Agency, who are leaders in local government innovation. The project is also backed by key central government departments.

The project covers five main strands: emotional resilience for 11 to 13 year olds; wellbeing of older people; guaranteed apprenticeships; neighbourhoods and community empowerment; and parenting. In each of these areas it will test out new approaches; measure their impact; develop replicable methods; and look at their cost effectiveness. Two underpinning themes will investigate the relationship between wellbeing and environmental sustainability and how best to measure wellbeing at a local level.

This report has been undertaken as part of the neighbourhood and community empowerment strand, which aims to accelerate understanding of how local authorities can, through their community engagement and neighbourhood working practices, increase the wellbeing of their residents.

Key points:
- A growing body of research supports the suggestion that community and neighbourhood empowerment has the potential to improve the wellbeing of residents and communities.
- Some forms of community empowerment involve power which is a ‘zero sum’ – where power is handed from one group to another, such as councillors devolving decisions on budgets to the community. However, empowerment does not always require this redistribution; often it requires that communities maximise their own capabilities by working together and involving themselves in civil society.
- Some of the less tangible outcomes of empowerment, such as increased contact between neighbours or improved knowledge of the local democratic process, have the potential to enhance wellbeing.
- empowerment that helps individuals and communities to exert control over the circumstances that affect their lives, thereby improving local wellbeing.
- Empowerment ‘done badly’ can lead to individuals and communities feeling that they cannot influence local circumstances and that they have very little control over some aspects of their lives. Poorly thought out empowerment initiatives can lead to disempowerment, which in turn reduces local wellbeing.