Our plans for 2025
The team is looking forward to a productive year ahead – our blog lays out some of our ambitious projects you’ll be hearing more about as we progress them.
This first quarter of the year continues some of the exciting work we have been involved in throughout the past year. Programmes like RORE where our teams are working alongside others from NEF, CLES and Coops UK to transform regional economies to deliver for local people and our planet. We are also playing our part in the evolution of the Mid Essex region’s ambitious and progressive efforts to use a Thriving Places approach across health, district council and community based institutions, and the vital research work with our partners at University of Bath and others to help places to grow local health ahead of global profits.
We are also really looking forward to lots of new exciting opportunities. Each of these projects and partnerships draw on the strengths of our team and experience in contributing to thriving places.
Convening and co-creating. We’re working with our colleagues at the Ideas Alliance to explore how the ‘culture’ of places can be shaped to enable bold and innovative work to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century. We are hoping to bring together partners in three different areas who are already investing heavily in shifting ‘ways of working’ across diverse partnerships within their local places. We are designing a new programme to capture the learning about that ‘magic dust’ that happens in the in-between spaces around specific projects, processes, strategies and collaborations, to gradually shift existing mindsets and approaches to help create fertile ground and momentum for longer term change – even if individuals leave or institutions come and go. We’ll bring you updates as this work progresses.
Research and Insight. We’ve just started working with partners at Community Council for Somerset and with Somerset Community foundation to explore how it can best make use of the insights and aspirations of the communities local to the Hinkley Point C development, in designing and delivering the next five years of their Community Fund. We’re excited to bring the Thriving Places framework approach and dataset to support local partners’ experience of working with communities, and thinking systemically about how community funding can be designed to drive long term impact.
Enabling, engaging and embedding. We’ve recently started a new partnership with Rugby Borough Council which is developing its approach to focusing on inequality, and embedding the Thriving Places Framework across the organisation and beyond. The council is embarking on an exciting period of change from really diverse starting points. We are exploring new ways of working with the team, ranging from building the indicators into their corporate KPIs, through to rethinking how procurement and commissioning approaches can use the Thriving Places Framework to connect benefits and linked outcomes, and into considering how placemaking approaches can be considered through a Thriving Places lens.
‘Working with CTP has given us a great opportunity to embed the Thriving Places Framework into the Council’s work. The team’s expertise has helped us refine the project into a very exciting brief.’ – Dan Green, Deputy Chief Executive at Rugby Borough Council.
Exchange and advocacy. We’re also recruiting a new Strategic Communications Lead to help us tell better stories about what is already working in places. We want to make visible the work that is already being done by the partners we work with in communities. We want to share much more widely our experiences and insights across these projects, as well as amplifying the voices of those who are part of the day to day machinery of running places. Throughout 2025 and beyond we hope to grow awareness of, and appetite for the urgent work of transforming our economy for good, and shout from the rooftops about what’s actually possible and already happening on the ground in a place near you!
Hold on to your hats – it’s going to be an amazing year!
Rosie Maguire, Policy and Programmes Manager and Rachel Laurence, Deputy Chief Executive
Would you like practical support to help shift your organisation, community or region to a Wellbeing Economy approach? CTP is here to help. Get in touch at hello@centreforthrivingplaces.org
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