Power in our hands

Nothing like Big Local has ever existed: it involves 150 places, each with more than £1 million of funding, where residents decide how they want to make their area a better place to live. The programme is multifaceted and varied, and so when it comes to research, Local Trust structures learning around questions that address key aspects of the programme. Our 2018-2020 research and evaluation plan introduced three lines of inquiry, all of which, in different ways, help to test the Big Local hypothesis: 

“Long term funding and support to build capacity gives residents in hyper-local areas agency to take decisions and to act to create positive and lasting change.”

As we come to the end of this plan, we’ve compiled three reports on what we know at this point, as well as identifying some gaps. The three reports are on resident-led decision making, place-based funding and positive and lasting change.