The Thriving Places Approach
The Thriving Places Approach is a broad set of services that can transform how places work. Centre for Thriving Places has decades of learning and experience to help you grow wellbeing in a rapidly changing world.
Our rigorous, practical and flexible approach is designed for local changemakers like you in all sectors and all levels of ‘place’: from organisations to communities, from local to regional government and with public and private sector service providers.
We support you to co-create and embed a deep understanding of your shared goals, the outcomes that need to be prioritised to get there, and the ways you can adapt policy, investment, processes and ways of working to deliver now and for the long term.
We help you come together to overcome the challenge of shifting to a new way of thinking and acting that delivers the outcomes that matter to people. Our approach can ignite and embed a lasting cycle of change across the complexities of a place.
The Core Elements
The core elements that create this positive self sustaining cycle of change include:
Convening and Co-creating:
- Facilitating people and organisations to form inclusive cooperative networks, breaking down silos and setting the conditions for shared working.
- Co-creating a collective understanding, envisioning and planning how to rewire your place to grow the capacity to thrive.
- Through this, creating a shared bespoke Thriving Places Framework, goals and outcomes to support implementation.
Engaging, Enabling and Embedding:
- Supporting different parts and connections points within the system to focus on where, when, and how to integrate these goals within policy, process and decision making.
- Enabling the changes needed (e.g. in mindsets, knowledge etc) to support real, long term change.
- Then supporting them to embed this work in order to make and deliver policy and practice to achieve the desired outcomes within their shared framework and goals.
Research and Insight:
- Building transferable evidence and practical insights on what works to grow a thriving place.
- And supporting places to identify their own unique learnings.
Exchange, Advocacy and Influence:
- Sharing insights and knowledge exchange to stimulate and accelerate the deep, transformative change needed.
- Advocating widely for the transformational effects of a wellbeing economy so more places adopt a thriving places approach
Our Services
These elements are delivered using the Thriving Places suite of services which includes a comprehensive toolkit, place-based support services and research and insight including:
Place-based Consultancy
Policy and Programme Design
Working with places to:
- Integrate the Thriving Places Framework, approach and evidence base into strategy and policy design.
- Design innovative policy and approaches in a range of specific policy areas, including community led economic development, regenerative local wealth building, employment and skills, inclusive economies, strategic commissioning, placemaking and planning.
- Improve programme design for interventions, services, funding streams and programme infrastructure, to enable places to build a thriving approach to theory and strategy into their system at practical level.
Applied Research and Analysis with Places
Working with places to:
- Maximise value from available evidence and data (including synthesising, fresh analysis and insights).
- Develop and deliver bespoke research programmes (including quantitative, qualitative and participatory) to inform policy, strategy and measurement.
- Support places to identify their own unique learnings.
Partnership development
Working with places to:
- Bring together partners who work in different parts of the system to break down silos and have joined up conversations to tackle shared problems.
- Design and deliver processes to create shared strategies or goals across multi-stakeholder groups.
- Improve processes within an organisation to bring together different teams and departments to better integrate their work around a thriving places approach.
Leadership
We work with people in places to:
- Provide training and coaching to develop confidence and capacity for systems thinking, co-creation and radical place-based leadership
- Grow their knowledge, practice, capacity and confidence in driving change, integrating a thriving place approach, and connecting them to other leaders driving similar work in other places.
- Provide training and capacity building around using and understanding data; building a compelling case for change; strategically integrating new approaches across different policy areas.
Research and Insight
Expanding Evidence and Learnings:
Working with partners to:
- Build transferable evidence and practical insights on what works to grow a thriving place.
- Influence and inform decisions and decision makers and those seeking to unlock and accelerate change across sectors.
- Seek to create and contribute to diverse sectors through partnerships and collaborations that advance thinking in new directions.
Thriving Places Toolkit
Our teams provide a range of products and tools to help navigate the pathway to a thriving place, these include:
- Thriving Places Framework: Evidence-based map of the key interconnected conditions a place needs to thrive with guidance on indicators to measure.
- Thriving Places Database: Database of wellbeing indicator data for local authorities across England and Wales from reputable official and expert sources.
- Thriving Places Index: CTP’s flagship analysis of how places across the country perform against key drivers of wellbeing of people and planet.
- Thriving Places Survey Builder: Flexible survey tool to understand the lived experience in places and of specific groups.