“Power in our Hands” – Looking back on eight years of Big Local

At Just Ideas we are honoured that Local Trust have drawn on our work in production of a recent paper on resident-led decision making.

Through Big Local, Local Trust support 150 communities with an investment of more than £1 million of funding, where residents decide how they want to make their area a better place to live.

Celebrating eight successful years, the Big Local programme was designed to not only fund community projects of choice, but to build capacity, and create lasting change.

To understand the extent to which the programme has achieved these aims, Local Trust last year developed an ambitious Research and Evaluation Action Plan which outlines a hypothesis about what the Big Local programme will achieve.

Under the banner ‘Power in our Hands’ Local Trust have produced three papers bringing together research conducted over the period of the action plan, along with other relevant research, to understand our current learning as it relates to the lines of inquiry.

The three papers are on resident-led decision-making, place-based funding and positive and lasting change and are linked to in the Local Trust blog here.