Welcome to the Well London home page

On 18 July 2007 Big Lottery Fund announced that the Well London Alliance had been awarded £9,460,000 from its Well-being Fund to deliver a portfolio of projects in twenty of London's most deprived communities.
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Keep in touch with the programme as it develops.
Well London is an exciting, 5-year project that will work with local people to transform their health. There's going to be a lot going on with a wide variety of different projects and initiatives, as well as opportunities for you to get involved and have your say. If you'd like to be kept informed of the Well London programme as it develops then please register here. We promise not to send you too many e-mails and you can unsubscribe at any time.

If you have any questions on the overall programme contact:

Alison Pearce
Well London Programme Manager Tel 020 7983 4544

The six Well London partners each have a lead role for three or more boroughs. If you have a question relating to a specific borough please contact them in the first instance. A list of the boroughs and Well London lead partners can be found further down this page.

Use the links below to navigate around this page.

Introduction to the programme
The LHC brought together the following organisations to form the Well London Alliance. The partners bring both strategic influence and local community-led experience. Each leads on a key theme of the programme and each is the lead partner to three or four local programme areas.

• London Health Commission
• Central YMCA
• Groundwork London
• London Sustainability Exchange
• University of East London
• Arts Council England, London
• South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
  
  Click for more information on the Well London Alliance partners.
  

The Well London programme will invest in local community-led projects:

• Promoting mental health and well-being
• Improving healthy eating choices
• Promoting access to open spaces and increasing physical activity

We will encourage new ways of working on these issues through culture and tradition and have developed a unique monitoring and evaluation framework to ensure we capture what works.

Strategy and approach

Our mission is to facilitate community-led projects, in partnership with local providers, to deliver projects that improve open spaces and mental health, and encourage healthy eating. All our work will be informed by a rigorous and robust evaluation framework and will look to empower communities, enabling them to continue to improve their health and surroundings long after the lifetime of the partnership.

Read the Well London strategy document (819kb, PDF)

During the pilot phase we used a 'whole systems' approach, bringing together local residents and organisations whose activities have an impact on them to identify local health needs. People together reflect on these findings in the light of existing data and explore potential interventions that could best meet these needs. These have included global community café events; appreciative enquiry; portfolio development workshops; and stakeholder review.

The community engagement schedule began in the Phase 1 boroughs on 29th October. Phase 2 is now underway.
Read more..............

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Well London projects

There are fourteen projects in a two-tiered approach.

• six 'heart of the community projects' which will deliver capacity building, accessibility work and consultation across the whole programme
• eight theme projects focused on mental well-being, physical activity or healthy eating

Initial engagement with communities will determine which mix of projects takes place in each SOA. All the projects are listed below with the Well London Alliance partner lead in brackets.

Heart of the community projects
These are projects that will deliver community engagement and capacity building by:

• increasing access to Well London projects and other health improvement opportunities and
• brokering changes in local service provision and activities to meet community need, as well as
• ensuring access to all sectors of the community to our theme projects.

1. CADBE (Community engagement, assessment, design, brokerage, enterprise) - our groundbreaking research and evaluation framework. (UEL)

2. Youth.community - will make sure that children and young people are included in all aspects of the programme. (Central YMCA)

3. Well London Delivery teams (2 each with 10 SOAs) - will form teams of 5+ volunteers in each area to empower people to make healthier choices. (LSx and Central YMCA)

4. Training communities - will plan and deliver a variety of training for community members to support project delivery of the other projects. (SlaM)

5. WellNet - will establish a learning network for communities and professionals across all the projects to share lessons learnt. Will include events, newsletters and web site. (LSx)

6. Active Living Map - will use GIS technology to produce web-based maps for each SOA which will draw together in a single resource a broad range of well being opportunities within easy reach of each community. (Groundwork London)

Theme projects
These projects are based on the five themes of the Well London programme:

Culture and Tradition
7. Be Creative, Be Well - will use the arts and cultural activity to help engage communities and individuals in a process of change, to improve environments and provide accessible physical activities. (Arts Council England, London)

Healthy Eating
8. Buywell - will make it easier to buy good quality, affordable and culturally sensitive food locally through influencing what's already there and setting up new schemes based on local need. (LSx)

9. Eatwell - will increase rates of healthy eating and promote a sense of community through celebrating good food and practical activities like cook and eat clubs. (LSx)

Mental health and well-being
10. DIY Happiness - will use humour, creativity and evidence emerging from the field of positive psychology to provide practical advice and information that will increase people's ability to 'bounce back' from adversity, reduce both the physical and the psychological impact of stress, increase resilience, and build durable personal resources. (SlaM)

11. Mental well-being Impact Assessment - enables stakeholders to identify the potential impacts on mental well-being of their proposals/projects/programmes (SlaM)

12. Changing minds - will recruit and train local people with direct experience of mental ill health to deliver mental health awareness training in target communities. It will empower people to use their experience to help reduce the stigma and discrimination faced by many people with mental health problems and promote understanding of mental health and well-being. (SlaM)

Open spaces
13. Healthy Spaces - physical improvements to the local environment that involve the local community in every step from planning to implementation will be complemented by structured programmes of activities. (Groundwork London)

Physical activity
14. Activate London - will increase physical activity levels through increasing the range of sports and active recreation activities available to the community through signposting existing opportunities and delivering new activities. (Central YMCA)


Well London partner contact details

Where is it happening?
Well London is a regional portfolio with projects in 20 of the 33 London boroughs. The 20 communities are all in Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) (small geographical areas covering around 1500 to 2000 people.

More information from Office for national Statistics. Opens new window) with Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) in worst 10% in London.

UEL's research design requires that a consistent and systematic process be used to select the target LSOA in each borough. To select the areas we took the following steps (see resources for further details):

• Rank all London LSOAs by Index of Multiple Deprivation
• Select those with IMD in the worst 11%
• Select boroughs with at least four LSOAs
• Primary care trust and local authorities shortlist two from these four LSOAs that would most benefit
• Randomly select which the final two will be the intervention LSOA and which will be the control

The programme will be phased and started with nine boroughs in October 2007 with the other ten coming online in April 2008. Maps of the intervention areas are available in the table below in pdf format.

Click here for the control area maps.

We have now identified a co-host partner for each area for the community engagment phase which will last around 5 months. Co-hosts are local organisations that will provide venues and refreshments for local events and lead on local marketing activity to make sure we get good representation from as broad a range of the community as possible. Community engagement will be ongoing throughout the Well London programme and we expect to reach the perceived 'hard to reach' groups that may not come forward at the initial stages.

View the community profiles (follow the link and click on 'pen portrait' in the MS Excel file) of all LSOAs. These draw on existing data e.g. PCT and local authority reports, census data and other published datasets as well as 'walkabouts' that took place with a member of the alliance along with a local contact to get a feel of the area.

University of East London are leading on the Communuity engagement as part of the CADBE project.

Round 2 - community engagement timetable
Community engagment in the Phase 2 boroughs began with the Bellingham Community café on Saturday 10th May.

View the complete schedule of activty - please note that these dates may be subject to change depending on local circumstances. We are trying hard to make sure that any changes are kept to a miminum.

Please also note that the community engagement sessions are aimed primarily at residents of the LSOA areas, although everyone is welcome. The process includes opportunities for the local stakeholders to feed in their views before the final project design stage.

If you plan to attend please contact the relevant co-host or Well London lead partner in the first instance, or Simone Boothe, Well London Administrator.

Community engagement process
There are a number of key events and activities which make up the process. These are as follows:

o Facilitators Training Day: dual task event.
o Community Cafes: community diagnostic event
o Aspirational visit: dual task event
o Appreciative Enquiry Workshop: partnership diagnostic event
o Consortium Portfolio Workshop: Action Planning
o Stakeholder Review Workshop: feedback and stakeholder consultation event.

For more information on the process contact Kevin Sheridan, Community Development Fellow, University of East London

Please be aware that dates and times are subject to alteration and you are advised to check with
Kevin Sheridan at UEL or with the local co-hosts.

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Well London resources

• Community engagement schedule Phase 2 - May 2008 (232kb, pdf)
  More maps of the Super Output areas (link to UEL website)
• Comparison area maps (pdf format)
• List of the boroughs, community profile data and pen portraits (link to UEL website)
• How were the areas selected? (1,069 kb, pdf)
• Borough briefing paper (108 kb, pdf)
• Well London strategy document (819kb, pdf)
• BIG launched the Well-being Fund in 2006. Find out more about the development of Well London and the Phase 1 bid.
  

Well London Contacts

Well London LHC team

Alison Pearce
Well London Programme Manager Tel 020 7983 4544

Simone Boothe,
Well London Administrator Tel 020 7983 4119

Gus Wilson, LHC Development & Communications Manager
Tel 020 7983 4120

Well London Alliance

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Please contact Gus Wilson, Development and Communications Manager if you need more information or if anything on this page is incorrect.