What is community action?

Community action is any activity that increases the understanding, engagement and
empowerment of communities in the design and delivery of local services.

Community action includes a broad range of activities and is sometimes described as

‘social action' or ‘community engagement'. These activities can vary in their objective,
the role the community plays, the types of activities involved, their scale and their
integration within the council. What they have in common is that they all involve greater
engagement of local citizens in the planning, design and delivery of local services.

Why is community action important?

Community action is about putting communities at the heart of their own local services.
Involving communities in the design and delivery of services can help to achieve a
number of objectives, including:

 Building community and social capacity – helping the community to share

knowledge, skills and ideas.
 Community resilience – helping the community to support itself.
 Prevention – a focus on early access to services or support, engagement in design,
cross-sector collaboration and partnerships.
 Maintaining and creating wealth – for example helping people into employment or
developing community enterprises.
Role of the Community

The role the community plays can include community consultation, joint planning, joint
design, joint delivery and community-led activities.

The types of activity can include:

 Asset transfer (either through formal transfer to bodies such as parish councils or
community interest companies, or transfer of their management to local community
and voluntary groups).
 Making better use of physical resources, such as council-owned buildings, to
support community-led activities.
 Community engagement in decision-making (for example through public
engagement events where the community helps to decide local priorities, co-design
or co-commission services).
 Community networks
 Community grants

What is Community Dynamics?

The Community Dynamics data has been constructed by Social Life; an
organisation specialising in research and community projects exploring how people are
affected by changes in the built environment.
The datasets use modelled data from the annual Community Life
Survey and Understanding Society Survey to map this data to Output Areas. This can
then be used to help predict how people are likely to feel about the areas they live in.
 The datasets are presented indexed against the country within Local Insight, where a
positive score (greater than zero) indicates that an area is performing better than the
national average and a negative score (below zero) indicates an area is performing
worse than the national average. The datasets available in Local Insight are:
 Belonging: Shows predicted average levels of belonging for local areas
 Local social relationships: Shows predicted strength of local social relationships
 Satisfaction with local areas as a place to live: Shows predicted average levels of
satisfaction with local area

What could it be used for?

For commissioners, policy-makers and anybody else involved in the design and delivery
of local services, Community Dynamics data can be used to bring additional depth into
the understanding of your local areas.
Particularly, these datasets could have a role to play in projects and initiatives looking to
work in a more asset-based way.
We’ve outlined a few examples below – and as always we would love to hear your use
cases too!

Matching service provision to need

The Community Dynamics data gives valuable insight into how people feel about the
place they live in and can shape decisions about which services are offered in particular
neighbourhoods.
For example, if a neighbourhood scores particularly lowly on “Local social relationships”,
it could be useful to see what community groups, clubs and activities are currently
operating in that area.
Overlaying these two pieces of data on a map could help answer questions and
influence decision-making on:
 Are there enough community groups and spaces that encourage people to build new
relationships?
 Are the services used regularly?
 Are there any demographic groups that are not catered for?
 Are the local services advertised and signposted clearly for residents?
 How could community groups be used more effectively?
This could be used to make a compelling, evidence-based case for funding for local
projects.

Learn lessons from what is working

The Community Dynamics data highlights areas that score highly on sense of
belonging, satisfaction and local social relationships.
Comparing the Community Dynamics data to other contextual datasets could help
identify areas that are similar on a range of socio-economic indicators, but differ greatly
in terms of social relationships and perceptions of the area. Examining this information
side by side could help you select case studies of similar areas with different community
dynamic outcomes to explore what other factors are in play that lead to residents in
 these similar areas feeling particular isolated/included or positive/negative about their
local area.
Pin-pointing these areas can provide a platform for important conversations with
residents about why they think this is. Insights from these conversations can be used to
learn from what is working, and export particular initiatives and ideas to other
neighbourhoods.

Designing the built environment

Understanding how people feel about the places they live can be useful information
when considering the built environment. Are particular designs and spaces more likely
to foster positive perceptions of belonging and encourage social relationships?
We have blogged before on how data on the prevalence of loneliness could be used to
shape environments to be more inclusive for elderly people. And the same could be
said for using Community Dynamics data to inform the design of community spaces.
It goes without saying (although we will say it anyway…) that no single dataset can tell
us the whole story about a particular area. However, adding subjective data around
perceptions alongside the socio-economic and demographic context sets us on the way
to a more rounded picture.

Explore the data for yourself

The Community Dynamics data is now available in Local Insight for you to explore,
alongside more than 800 other socio-economic datasets for local areas.
Register for a free trial of Local Insight now and
 Visualise Community Dynamics data on maps and dashboards, with the data matched
to the areas you care about
 Compare Community Dynamics to other key datasets to test perceptions on what
makes a thriving community
 Overlay Community Dynamics data with the location of your key services to assess
service provision and need
 Gain a fuller picture of what life is like in your service patch for the residents that live
there.

Social Life often use Community Dynamics Data as a starting point in their work with
clients, who are interested in finding out more about the strengths of communities in
specific neighbourhoods. These clients could be local authorities, housing associations,
developers or other agencies who are keen to gain a better understanding of
communities affected by their work and, in doing so, want to take a more assets based
approach to working in those areas. Social Life’s team can provide further research in
that locality to explore and test the issues indicated by the data – providing a more
thorough picture of the community’s dynamics. If you are interested in working with
Social Life in this way, please get in touch with their team.