Developing a participatory Community Chest health fund in Barking and Dagenham
Soda worked with Barking and Dagenham to develop and deliver a participatory budgeting approach for its Community Chest for social prescribing funding pilot in 2022/23
What was involved?
Co-producing a new model of community health fund - jointly investing NHS and Local Authority funds into local community-based social prescribing activities
Building a cross sector, core leadership team and steering group through facilitated workshops and online sessions led by Soda
Engaging communities with lived experience through co-design processes
Building relationships between VCSE orgs, the Local Authority and NHS partners to enable collective decision making
Supporting the design of a participatory funding approach and evaluation that was co-created by the leadership team and steering group
What Soda delivered?
Collective priority setting sessions
A proposal development day at the Barking Learning Centre with over 50 participants
A pitching and voting day with 20 VCSE organisations from Barking & Dagenham
A jointly developed monitoring and evaluation approach which met the needs of funded groups, the local authority and NEL ICS (in accordance with the NHSE Health Inequalities funding received)
Buy-in and new relationships formed across the Barking and Dagenham VCSE and social prescribing landscape