The Southwark’s Resident Health and Wellbeing programme was commissioned by Southwark Council in 2024. It worked on three large council estates to support the collaborative design of public health interventions to boost health and wellbeing and tackle the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This report captures what has been learnt from the co-design process and the impact of interventions on two of the three estates on resident health and wellbeing.
Social Life supported the programme from its start. We worked with residents to understand everyday life in their communities and to identify and design interventions that would support wellbeing. We helped set up and deliver the projects and carried out a light-touch evaluation of their impact.
In spite of the short time that the activities ran we found evidence of impact on health and wellbeing through community development activities and a large-scale community event – RockiFest - on the Rockingham Estate, and some promising but small-scale impact from work to tackle loneliness and improve community connections delivered by Paxton Green Timebank on the Kingswood Estate.
The collaborative design process enabled projects to be designed and commissioned that were bespoke for each estate, recognising community strengths and vulnerabilities. There was consensus among partners that funding existing activities rather than bringing in new programming or a new organisation had been the best use of the funding. The RHAW project also shone a light on the need for better models of place-based working that put residentsand local relationships at the heart of service delivery and community empowerment.
