Gloucestershire Hotspots Network is a group of community organisations that have come together to catalyse and invest in connections in communities.
As part of my work at CTP, we supported the Network as a Research Partner and captured insights and learning including adaptations to the aims and approach as the work iterated to respond to the changing context and needs of the partnership. We documented how community organisations can come together to drive a change in their place’s conditions; pushing for different ways of allocating resources – including keeping money in communities – as well as increasing their collective visibility and credibility.
I worked with network members to first dig into how a place-based framework might reveal a more joined up picture of how they were driving a change in their place’s conditions. We also collectively developed an approach to gathering data more consistently, in the end opting for case studies which were practical given the time and resources members had available to collect data, and being mindful of not compromising their relationships with community members by seeking to extract information using surveys and forms.
As the project developed, our role focused more on supporting partners to reflect on how they were pushing more effectively for different kinds of decision making and resource allocation at district and county level. We did this through structured reflective discussions and interviews.
The summary report contains an overview of the learning and the full report documents the work we did together and what we learnt in the process.