Community Led Health & Wellbeing (Live Well)

Live Well is Greater Manchester’s movement for community-led health and wellbeing, supporting healthier, happier and fairer communities by growing opportunities for everyone to Live Well.

Join and connect with the movement:

• Learn and share through the Live Well Network

7 May: Increased support for young people with additional needs and their families

Online, 11:30am - 1:00pm

The demand for children and young people’s SEND support is growing, leading to increasing waiting lists, rising school exclusions, and more children being placed in Tier 4 (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) beds for neurodivergent mental health needs. But what if we could move away from crisis-driven SEND intervention and instead focus on a preventative, community-led, and system-enabled approach that adapts environments to better support SEND needs rather than treating the child?

Join us to explore the impact of co-produced and tailored community interventions in creating SEND-inclusive learning environments for children and young people. We’ll discuss how projects across GM are devolving power to children, parents and carers to influence decision-making, and how collaboration between schools, families, and community organisations are being strengthened to provide more effective wrap-around support. By working together, listening and empowering children and young people, these approaches are improving support for SEND children and their families, and carers, while also helping to reduce school exclusions and waiting times for healthcare-focused SEND services.  

For more information and to register, visit Eventbrite here.

Live Well is the region’s work and shared commitment to ensure:

• People have opportunities to be healthy, happy and connected through a variety of activities, support and information
• People can help make their communities healthier and happier, they are being heard and making a difference
• Communities have the resources to make change happen

The Greater Manchester Live Well programme works alongside people, communities, and places to tackle the barriers and create the conditions where everyone can Live Well.

Evidence for community power

We know that being able to talk about the real, tangible impact of this work is a fundamental to uniting everyone behind GM Live Well.We have compiled the most live evidence in the UK for community power in the GM Live Well Evidence for Community Power Map. Over 50 pieces of UK research are assembled in this evidence base, spanning the last 15 years, and point to 7 key impact themes, grounded in evidence, data and stories:  

evidence-for-community-power

Community-led

Greater Manchester's thousands of brilliant local communities and organisations already helping people to Live Well across Greater Manchester. They contribute in powerful ways to Greater Manchester's commitment to tackle health and wellbeing inequalities. 

Everyday, the information, activities and help they provide keep people connected, supported and resilient. Health and wellbeing is community led when the opportunities in the places we live and the things we do are delivered with, for and by our communities 

System enabled

​Live Well will tackle health inequalities by changing how we work with communities and in our system, to grow community action, power and wealth. Residents, community groups and public services are working together to transform how things are done.

​What difference will Live Well make?

Walking in nature with people we know, volunteering for a local charity, doing something creative at an art group, having our say in the things that matter to us and our communities. Greater Manchester residents tell us these are the sorts of things that help us Live Well.

There are powerful examples of the system taking a ‘more than medicine’ approach to health in our communities, growing the opportunities in the places we live and the things we do. 

Community connectors and leaders are linking people to their local information, support, and activities, and innovative creative health projects focus on exploring identity, community and belonging, peer support groups reduce isolation and provide advocacy, and community networks and co production groups elevate voices and ideas for change that support healthy lives, communities, and places.

​Live Well builds on this and our city region’s excellent track record around Social Prescribing.

If understood, resourced, and championed, this community led health will make a huge contribution to reduced health inequalities and create the conditions where everyone in Greater Manchester can Live Well.

Working with 150 contributors, it was agreed the Live Well programme would add capacity to the localities, communities and organisations who are already doing this work, making it easier for people to find the support they need.

National Lottery Community Funding is supporting Greater Manchester to:

1. Break down barriers

Shifting systemic and structural blockages when we can. And influencing positive action and change on things that are holding inequalities in place, even when they are not in our direct control

2. Grow our offer

• Enabling learning, sharing and networking across the region and locally
• Encouraging investment from national funders and philanthropists to accelerate the journey we are already on
• Spreading practice out of the region’s existing person centred care, social prescribing, and creative health

You can read our six month report to the National Lottery Community Fund here: live-well-report-12th-aug

Guidance 

The Greater Manchester Equality Alliance (GM=EqAl) has launched new guidance on hearing the voice of lived experience in policy making, as part of the VCFSE Accord. It aims to support public sector colleagues to include the voice of lived experience in policy making.