A bit of background
In late 2022, our partners at The Civic Data Cooperative (CDC) approached Capacity to work together to get to the root of this problem. Over 10 months, CDC and Capacity set out to ask local people in Widnes ‘what does wellbeing mean to you?’, exploring more about the things we need to measure if we really want to know when people are ‘well’.
This project had 3 main objectives:
- Understand what wellbeing means in Widnes: Talking to local people to understand what they think contributes to their wellbeing and, in turn, how we would know if someone is starting to struggle.
- Explore this through the eyes of people in Widnes: Residents are the experts, so we recruited a team of community researchers to help us understand attitudes, beliefs and behaviour to reveal the story behind the statistics.
- Imagine better solutions with data: We wanted to understand if people want to see and use the information organisations collect about communities.
What we did
The Round ‘Ere project ran for 10 months between November 2022 and September 2023, and was split into 6 phases.
Planning and designing: We spent time getting to know what wellbeing means and what this looks like in Widnes through desktop research,.
Recruitment of community researchers: We ran a recruitment campaign to recruit 14 community researchers, local people who could support us to engage with residents.
Training and onboarding: We designed a training package to equip our community researchers with the knowledge and skills to design a tool for research and deliver engagement.
Community research: Over 7 weeks, our community researchers completed 207 interviews with people in Widnes about what wellbeing means to them.
Distilling the insight: We spent time codifying the data collected and distilling insights by delivering a workshop to add depth to our understanding.
Exploring the role of a data hub: A bigger ambition of this project was to explore the role of a Data Commons, we did this by hosting two workshops for local stakeholders.
This project allowed us to design a successful approach to participatory design that can be used for community research, giving us insight to inform user-centric solutions for wellbeing services. The approach provides a blueprint that can be applied to community research in other areas and future projects to strengthen local decision-making.
What we heard
People spoke about personal wellbeing and community wellbeing.
Personal wellbeing:
When people spoke of personal wellbeing, three topics came up frequently:
- Emotional, mental and social wellbeing: connecting with friends, family and other social groups.
- Physical health: the ability to be active and lead a healthy lifestyle.
- Spiritual health: the freedom to express or practice faith, religion or spirituality.
Community wellbeing:
We heard that community wellbeing relies on two factors:
- People: having a supportive community and sense of community spirit.
- Place: people want to feel like they have a choice of things to do, see and visit.
What happens next?
Round ‘Ere provides a tried and tested participatory design framework that can be applied to community research. CDC plan to expand this approach within and beyond Widnes, applying it to other sticky public sector problems to create space to truly listen to communities and to start to work to create real change in the Liverpool City Region.
Our work with CDC doesn’t end here. Round ‘Ere allowed us to develop a rich understanding of what wellbeing means to people in Widnes. We’re currently working with CDC to explore how the insights generated can be used to improve decision making at a local level.
Throughout 2024, we’ve been working with CDC to deliver ‘Greater Data‘, a new roadmap for civic data and public services in the Liverpool City Region.
