Community Development

Establishing the Altogether Better Community - helping your local community thrive

What makes a community thrive? Is it friendly neighbours? A healthy and safe place for families to live and play? Access to parks and areas to grow your own food? Peace of mind? Probably all those things. We believe that most people want to live like this, we also know that we’ve all got the talent and skills to make this happen.

Working with local people on projects that tackle issues affecting their communities, such as isolation and loneliness and cultural diversity, Altogether Better brings people together. We help empower them to become active agents of change in their communities. People identify issues and address them together through their own projects.

Altogether Better Community Development seeks to:

  • • build greater community cohesion by breaking down barriers to integration
  • • support people to develop the skills and knowledge that enable and empower them to participate actively in their local community
  • • build a greater appreciation among community institutions of the potential for individuals to contribute to their community
  • • increase opportunities for community organisations to work together. We have the methodology - now we want to help more communities.

Our job is to help local people recognise this and use those assets to do extraordinary things.

Altogether Better Community Development is an approach that adopts a different way of thinking about how to work for change – starting from a place of possibilities, strengths and capacities, as opposed to problems and deficiencies. This strength based approach helps residents and organisations manage change by mobilising their existing and potential capabilities, resources and assets.

We do this by:

  • • Focusing on the skills, resources and competencies people and communities have
  • • Working with individuals across all ages and life stages and all types of disability
  • • Looking at people in their family and social context and at the needs of the whole family
  • • Developing and maintaining informal supports and social networks
  • • Promoting better use of mainstream services
  • • Working locally and tapping into local networks and resources
  • • Working to a clear value base and set of principles which form the basis of all decisions and actions

We have worked closely with housing associations, councils, the NHS and the police to ensure that, collectively, we are helping local people to do extraordinary things together.