Community collaboration: CAPITAL report published
Public Health Wales and Tai Pawb are pleased to announce the publication of the report from the CAPITAL project, which ran from 2019-2021 with support from the Health Foundation.
The project brought together two distinct groups of people in the Morriston area of Swansea: people seeking sanctuary and social housing tenants. Through facilitating asset-based workshops, a group was created which decided to highlight the activities in their local area and share their skills through creating a regular newsletter. This act of collaboration and building new friendships resulted in participants scoring more highly on a number of tools used to measure integration and levels of self-efficacy, confidence and resilience. These factors combined account for around 10% of the health inequalities that are experienced by different groups (full stats and references in the report).
As well as the evaluation report, the project created a ‘Roadmap to Co-production’ which we are confident will be of use to others adopting this approach.
Key learning points:
- Use an asset-based approach
- Go into community work open minded- encouraging the group to take ownership and find their own solutions
- Flexibility is required to be inclusive- for example, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, group members were issued with data packs to allow them to continue to participate remotely
- When starting new initiatives, consider sustainability at the outset
- Having a diverse range of people involved really helps to find creative solutions
- Keeping in touch digitally ( e.g. What’s App), keeps people connected between meetings and helps people to see themselves as part of a group
You can watch a recording of presentation that the team made earlier in 2021 here.