Brighter Futures stories
Our stories
The members of the Brighter Futures partnership work with the community in a myriad of different ways. Staff and volunteers may come across community members at many different life stages and with a range of life events taking priority in their lives. Across the range of partners, a comprehensive range of support is offered both to community members and to organisations working with them.
Despite this diversity, there are some things that all the partners have in common. All of the partners work to engage community members with the attitude that support is “done with” not “done to”.
An important part of the members’ work is listening to community members, whether that is on a one-to-one level, or through informal and formal consultation methods. The partnership itself is responsive to members’ needs and uses the two member events which are held each year to collect feedback and plan relevant events and training to offer to members.
Members offer individuals and community groups a wide variety of support from immediate crisis support such as food banks through to long term interventions with people in need.
Underpinning the levels of support is a deep understanding of the local community and its needs, built up from a foundation of combined grassroots intelligence and robust data. This includes area profiles created for Oxfordshire County Council which can be found at Oxfordshire Data Hub – Health and Social Care – Community Insight Profiles.
The strength of the link between deprivation and poor life and health outcomes means that the partners are concerned to offer community members ways out of economic deprivation, and you will see examples of how this is turned into engaging opportunities.
Because the Brighter Futures partners work to understand the community they work with, there is a keen sense of the strengths within the community. The partners are always keen to celebrate this rather than to label the three wards as “in need” or use other terms which fail to inspire a sense of feeling at home and belonging.
Read the stories of how the partners and the community have worked together to support and address the needs and aspirations of people living in the Brighter Futures wards. The report uses this narrative approach to enable the reader to enter the world of the Brighter Futures partners and the community members, gaining an insight which reports and statistics cannot replace. We show how the stories link to the Brighter Futures theme areas as well as to the Cherwell District Council Everybody’s Wellbeing strategy.
The stories which follow come from a variety of partners in the Brighter Futures project, and they demonstrate how organisations are responding to residents' needs. You can also see how partners work together to enhance their services. In this report, we can only tell a sample of the work that has been done, but please get in touch to learn more if you would like.