Where People Meet: How We Celebrate, Sustain and Reimagine Community Centres

Community centres are a core and enduring part of the UK’s social infrastructure. They are hubs of social connection, stewards of health and wellbeing, vital partners in their local ecosystems and important physical assets that communities can depend on.

This report sets out what can be achieved if we celebrate, sustain and reimagine community centres for the future. It makes the case for meaningful investment, effort and focus at both the national and local level to dismantle the challenges standing in their way. It calls for their true value to be recognised and nurtured.

Podcast

Executive Summary

The case for investing in community centres

Community centres have long stood as pillars of local life, as places where people can meet, mix and connect; where care, fun and friendships bloom and problems are shared. But we are losing these spaces at pace and at scale. The impact of this loss is tangible in our everyday lives. Areas where there are no places to meet face poorer social and economic outcomes, including higher rates of ill health and child poverty. Felt most strongly in our most economically deprived communities, this is compounding the challenges of entrenched disadvantage and regional inequality.

But this is only part of the story. Against the odds, community centres remain woven into the fabric of place, improving people’s quality of life in critical ways. From health and well-being to social connection and cohesion, to belonging and civic pride, the effects that ripple from a community centre are deep and far-reaching. For too long their value has been overlooked, their contribution pegged as a ‘nice to have’. But this is beginning to change; there is growing recognition at both the local and national level of the need to restore the spaces that tie our communities together, to do so urgently and for the long term.

The purpose of this report

This report spotlights community centres as a vital piece in the puzzle of assets within a place. It turns to the past, examining the origins of community centres. It focuses on the present and the distinct challenges and strengths that define the community centre of today. And it looks ahead, putting forward a vision for their future and the contribution they could make to the regeneration of our neighbourhoods and local areas. The work presented here should be of interest to everyone engaged in place-based work, particularly:

• Community centres themselves
• Local government
• Housing associations
• Funders that support community assets
• Health partners
• National government

Community centres today

Community centres occupy a special place at the heart of their neighbourhoods. Each one is unique to its place, the people it serves, and the geography it inhabits. In total, there are approximately 21,000 community centres and halls in Great Britain hosting a wide range of activities, services, groups and events. How a community centre operates is shaped by its management and funding model. A combination of housing associations, local authorities and communities themselves take responsibility for the management of most community centres in the UK. The sector operates within a complex funding landscape, with a mix of funding streams underpinning the financial sustainability of each community centre, how it operates and the activities and services it offers. This is represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Community centre ownership models, funding streams and functions

The challenges to overcome

Community centres remain an important part of our social fabric, but their story today is a fragmented and precarious one. These vital community assets face six core challenges:

1. Existing funding options are often time consuming, difficult to access and rigid – and they risk entrenching inequalities
2. Buildings are costly and difficult to run and maintain, but access to the necessary support is limited
3. Perceptions about who a space is for create barriers to use that undermine the universal nature of community centres
4. The pressures facing community centre staff and volunteers have considerable personal and organisational consequences
5. Without a collective voice for the sector or access to bespoke support, community centres often operate in isolation
6. Current approaches to impact measurement fail to capture the true value of community centres

The strengths to build on

Despite the challenges faced, many community centres today play an active, strategic and essential role in the life of their place. Their strengths are manifold and multifarious – this report focuses on four of them.

Community centres are important local hubs for people to meet and connect to one another. Providing a spectrum of opportunities to engage and participate, community centres are spaces where meaningful relationships can be built, including between people from different classes, faiths, ethnicities and generations – driving social capital. In doing so, community centres provide the scaffolding for community cohesion locally, are key partners in tackling the UK’s loneliness problem and provide a natural home for civic engagement.

Community centres support the health and wellbeing of communities. As trusted spaces with deep local roots, community centres help alleviate pressures on the health system, provide space for colocation and directly deliver health and wellbeing activities. Rather than medicalising the challenges people face in their everyday lives, community centres can offer holistic, relational support that addresses the underlying causes. This often takes the shape of inclusive and fun activities like cooking, socialising and dancing.

Community centres have a unique and valuable role to play in the local ecosystem. Over time, community centres have built up trust within their communities by being non-judgmental and establishing genuine connections with people. This relational power provides the foundations for community-anchored collaboration and new approaches to place-based ways of working.

Community centres are physical assets as well as social goods. Each of the previous strengths – and many more besides – are made possible by the space that a community centre operates out of. As a physical part of a community, community centres can reflect the cultural, social, natural and historical context of an area, providing access to a facility that is enjoyable to spend time in, that makes a place feel invested in and that people feel proud of and connected to.

The community centre of 2040

At the core of this research is a vision for what community centres could become if fully optimised: vibrant, inclusive hubs that are financially secure, environmentally sustainable and deeply embedded in local decision-making. This vision is grounded in the past and the present. It is inspired by workshops held with the Sutton Centre in Bradford, Trinity Rooms Community Hub in Stroud and Shenley Court Hall in Birmingham, where we worked alongside people closely connected with each centre to imagine what life might be like in 15 years’ time and how their centre would respond.

“We are purposeful: we know why we’re here; the difference we make; the people we serve; the community we’re part of and the ecosystem that we operate in. We are here for, and think into, the long-term.”

The vision reinforces the community centre as a place of human connection; a source of local pride; offering something inherently preventative and universal; championing its community and, crucially, not a ‘nice-to-have’ but a core, dynamic, essential part of their place.

This vision is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all. What the future holds for a community centre will vary from place to place, depending on local assets, resources and priorities. It is, however, designed to influence the direction of travel and cement the position of community centres as places of first resort.

From vision to reality

For community centres to realise their full potential, they need to be recognised as a core part of the essential infrastructure of a place. Achieving this demands sustained investment, effort and focus at both the national and local level.

Community centres should be recognised as key strategic and delivery partners with deep knowledge of their communities

• National policymakers should recognise and support the role of community centres in local regeneration, particularly as part of the next wave of neighbourhood-focused initiatives such as the Plan for Neighbourhoods.
• Building on the English Devolution White Paper, national policymakers should recognise the role of the neighbourhood as a core unit for change in relation to thriving communities with community centres integrated into the English devolution agenda.
• Community centres should be factored in as vital social infrastructure within the government’s plans for new towns, urban extensions and sustainable place making more broadly.
• The Department of Health & Social Care and the NHS should strategically signal the importance of community centres as part of the NHS 10-year plan and the ambitions to shift towards a neighbourhood health service.
• Local government should recognise and champion community centres as important partners in identifying and working to address key strategic local priorities.

National policymakers should develop a stronger understanding of community centres as a sector, the sector’s collective needs and its impact

Progress towards this could be achieved through:

• A baseline state of the sector review to identify the number of community centres in the UK, the different ownership and management models and the number of staff and volunteers in the sector.
• Ensuring community centres are identified as a key civil society stakeholder across government and that this is reinforced in the forthcoming Civil Society Covenant.

New, long-term funding should be invested in community centres drawn from across the public, private and philanthropic sectors

• An independently administered, pooled fund should be created with resources drawn from a range of sources including funders; philanthropists; dormant assets and blended finance from the social investment sector. This would be for both current and future projects and should include revenue and capital support for at least 10-year funding cycles with funding for capacity building, networking and peer support as core components.
• Funding, including for maintenance of current centres and creation of new, high-quality centres should be prioritised in areas that have received less funding and support in the past and would benefit most from increased social capital.

Partners working in place should identify their role in ensuring the financial sustainability of community centres

• Funders should provide core, multi-year funding allowing for consistency and security.
• Local authorities should continue to invest in community centres as part of their wider approach to prevention and see their role as stewards to all community centres in their locality, supporting them to understand and access funding opportunities that exist and ensure they are included in wider place-based funding bids.
• Housing associations should continue to support community centres in their care, understanding the important role they play in residents’ and communities’ lives and prioritise them within operational and strategic planning.

Communities should be better supported to take ownership of local assets

• Local authorities should ensure there is a Community Asset Transfer policy in place and consider how they can work as effective partners with communities through and beyond the transfer process to ensure new ownership is set up for long-term success.
• Funders should provide more support to local organisations and networks who are pioneering new approaches to community asset development.
• Government to commit to the plans laid out in the English Devolution White Paper to create a stronger pathway to community asset ownership by replacing the community ‘Right to Bid’ with a strengthened ‘Right to Buy’ Assets of Community Value and provide communities with access to the capital needed to take up this right through a Community Wealth Fund.

Attention should be paid to how to better capture the difference that community centres make – reframing the narrative around value

• All partners should continue to explore how to move away from a reliance on metrics to a more long-term, adaptable, holistic evaluation approach that understands community centres’ universal and inherently preventative offer and the role they play as part of the ecosystem of their place.

Community centres are a core and enduring part of the UK’s social infrastructure. There is a real opportunity to dismantle the challenges standing in their way – to recognise and nurture their true value as strategic allies with deep experience of their place. In doing so, their power as catalysts and stewards of health locally, as homes for human connection, sources of local pride and champions of their place can take root, helping to overcome some of the most pressing challenges affecting the health and happiness of our communities. The recommendations set out in this report would begin a shift that is long overdue – one that celebrates, sustains and reimagines community centres for the future.

Case studies

The impact of community centres now and what’s possible ahead is illustrated by examples from across the UK.

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