Background Information to the Application Pack

COMMUNITY BUILDER – NEIGHBOURHOODS

BACKGROUND INFORMATION TO THE APPLICATION PACK

1. Background to the Ageing Well Torbay Programme

The Funder

Ageing Well Torbay is funded by the Big Lottery through its Fulfilling Lives: Ageing Better investment programme. Torbay is one of 14 areas in England selected in 2014 to receive funding from the programme. For more information please click on the link below:

The Ageing Well Torbay Programme started in April 2015 and is funded to March 2021. See

Facts and Figures

45% of Torbay’s population is over 50, and it is estimated that 6,000 of these residents are isolated.

The causes of this isolation are varied – older people have told us they are isolated due to retirement, bereavement, low income, poor health and mobility, lack of transport, and fear of leaving the house. From work carried out by Torbay Community Development Trust and partners over the last two years, we know that there are isolated older people in every neighbourhood of Torbay. Led by the Trust, the Ageing Well Torbay Programme is seeking to counteract this through a ‘whole systems’ approach that touches where people live, their social lives, their care, and how the rest of society view them.

What is Ageing Well Torbay trying to achieve?

Older people have told Torbay Community Development Trust that above all they want to be valued and to contribute to their community. Some older people have told the Trust that they have nothing to live for. All of the older people spoken to say they want to be treated with respect. The Ageing Well Torbay Programme seeks to:

• Re-connect older people with friends, their communities and where they live through an increased sense of ‘neighbourliness’ and engagement in a broader range of accessible and affordable activities
• Enable more older people to feel their lives have value and purpose as life changes, contributing their times, skills and knowledge to their community, viewing older age as an opportunity
• Ensure more older people have high personal, learning and service aspirations for later life facilitated by better information, advice and more integrated services, that older people design and produce with organisations
• Ensure more local residents value older people, that ageing is celebrated and viewed more positively by all.

What will happen?

Ageing Well Torbay programme outcomes (listed above) will be achieved through 3 linked groups of activities:

• Activities at the Neighbourhood level – a network of 14 community builders and connectors are being developed across Torbay to provide local intelligence and ongoing engagement to target the most isolated older people. Their grassroots knowledge will link older people with activities they want, providing individual support to those that need it to integrate back into the community. This will be supported by a series of community magazines delivered to doorsteps in every community, and 13 Timebanks across the 30 neighbourhoods in Torbay, where residents can exchange skills for mutual benefit. The Neighbourhood level work will be delivered using an Asset Based Community Development Approach. See section 2 below.
• Activities to raise aspirations and stimulate service redesign. Older people identified as having low aspirations will be prescribed a guided conversation, the purpose of which will be to encourage them to reconsider their social and care situation in a supportive environment and identify some goals to improve their lives. Goals might be activity based or care based, delivered through the neighbourhood structures discussed above, existing activities, creation of new activities, or through the redesign of an appropriate service. Specialised support will be identified for those older people with specific needs – such as carers, those with visual impairment, and other with specific needs. Different guided conversation models have been tested in the first 2 years of the Programme through delivery partnerships with Age UK, British Red Cross, Speak Out Torbay (SPOT supporting people with learning difficulties), Brixham Does Care, Carers’ Aid Torbay, MENCAP and MySupportBroker. Referrals to the scheme come via GPs and other parts of the Health and Care System and via the neighbourhood networks outlined above.
• Activities to promote a positive image of ageing locally. This group of activities will draw upon the above to create a positive media campaign and an annual ageing festival.

A new older people’s assembly

The most substantial asset we are drawing on for the Programme delivery are the skills, experience and time of people over 50 in Torbay. Underpinning the whole Programme is the creation of a new Older Person’s Assembly – this will be the voice of the Older Person in Torbay. Once established, the Assembly will hold the Ageing Well Programme Board to account and will be a lasting legacy once the Lottery funding has come to an end.

How the programme will be managed

The Programme is being led by a Core Partnership of The Torbay Community Development Trust, Age UK, Torbay Older Citizen’s Forum, Torbay and South Devon Clinical Commissioning Group, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, Torbay Council, Health and Well-being Board and Mears Plc with advisory support on Asset Based Community Developmentfrom Freedom Favours ( and Nurture Development (

When will programme activity take place?

Activity associated with Ageing Well Torbay commenced in April 2015. As a ‘test and learn’ initiative, activity will be implemented through 2 cycles of 3 years of activities to allow for review and refinement of what is needed to deliver programme outcomes. Creative engagement will take place throughout the Programme ensuring the activities are meeting the needs of isolated older people. A strong link has been made between the Programme and the local NHS Foundation which seeks to link the already integrated health and social care system in Torbay with preventative activity at the community level. Ageing Well will be a key partner in achieving this aim over the next 4 years.

How much?

The total budget for the Programme is just over £15.5million, £6 million of which is provided by the BIG Lottery and the rest provided as ‘match-funding’ and ‘in-kind’ funding.

1. Ageing Well Torbay – our approach to community building

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is an effective approach to restoring a culture of involvement and a sense of community.

“Only a coherent community, fully alive both in the world and in the minds of its members, can carry us beyond fragmentation, contradiction and negativity, teaching us to preserve, not in opposition but in affirmation and affection, all things needful to make us glad to live.”

Wendell Berry

Local people are better equipped to build their community than anyone else. An ABCD approach encourages them to come together to determine their own futures. To become more involved in making their neighbourhood more hospitable; a place where they can age well together, share in the bringing up of children, care for the marginalised and feel good about themselves and their community.

The ABCD approach is to deploy trained Community Builders to act as catalysts for the social change that people say they want to see. They make new connections among people and deepen the relationships between them. Each person is valued as a human being with an innate capacity to co-operate with and to care for others and is regarded as an unique individual with practical experience, insights, knowledge, skills and local connections to bring to the table.

The assumption is always made, (yet to be disproved), that everyone has something to contribute to the health, well-being and safety of others – that in every neighbourhood there is an abundance of such hidden treasure waiting to be discovered.

Pressures on welfare professionals predispose them towards the view that ageing is a problem. In reality, it is just another stage in life, bringing with it certain challenges for sure, but, like any other stage it is as much an exciting, rewarding and enjoyable prospect as we want to make of it.

“The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful”

Sharon Olds

Research shows us that the best way to have a life-enhancing old age is to enjoy an active social life involving a whole range of meaningful relationships.To this end, welfare thinkers have embraced asset based thinking and recognised the need for respectful, resilient and resourceful informal social networks. Timebanking is a social innovation which grew out of asset based thinking and has been successful in creating new friendships and strong social networks in many disadvantaged communities. Timebanks, like many others, have found that there are some very specific beliefs that can create barriers to stimulating informal care and more connected communities in the UK.

Generally, people today report that they:

• Are reluctant to offer unsolicited help, people like to be asked first.
• Tend to be ‘overcome with shyness’ when it came to asking for help from others.
• Believe that they have nothing of value to offer to others in their community.
• Feel that they ought to give unselfishly and yet disappointed when they didn’t receive help in return

Community Builders, and Timebank Brokers, have overcome such barriers by getting to know people and by gathering together and retelling stories of when people did join together to make things better for themselves and the wider community. By naming and describing all that people and groups have done to contribute to the common good in the past - and what in truth most people know how to do but have forgotten in the present - they facilitate the growth of a more positive attitude towards the future. And they capture loads of inspirational stories!

Opportunities to make tangible differences to community life are then organised by the Community Builders. They are continually looking for what it is that people are prepared to do for themselves and others. Together they develop these ideas, form groups, make connections and gather resources. ‘Matching Funds’ are often used to provide seed money for these action groups; local people pledge time which is matched by small amounts of cash.

Then the Community Builder steps back to allow the local people to do it for themselves. To be the change they want to see.

Their achievements are regularly broadcast to the wider community through the media, social media Apps and ‘magazines’ and by word of mouth so that more and more local people join in the task of defining what is to be done.

More conversations, celebrations, social events, ideas fairs, performance art, story-telling, community lunches and street parties encourage ever more people to come together freely and by common consent to pick up some of the responsibility for making the neighbourhood the sort of place in which they would all want to grow older.

These activities widen the circles of participation, contribution and inclusion and in time everyone’s focus shifts from what is wrong to what is strong - and to what can be built upon to be made even stronger.

Once ‘enlivened’ communities are better prepared to join forces with professional agencies to co-produce consensus building collaborations that mobilise all of the under-utilised ‘community assets’ that are present everywhere.

These most commonly include:

• the skills, knowledge and connections of local residents
• the collective power of local informal associations and clubs
• the resources of public, private and non-profit institutions
• the physical places and mediums of exchange* (*e.g. Timebanking)
• the shared stories, culture and heritage of local communities

Community Builders help weave the fabric of the neighbourhood. They bring together the natural ‘connectors’, people who know their neighbours and know what is happening in ‘their patch’. The connectors reach out through learning conversations and find more people like themselves. They become the eyes, ears and hearts of the community and make contact with the most isolated and those who may hitherto of been labelled as ‘hard to reach’.

Among the many techniques and theoretical approaches used by community builders, (and their bands of connectors), are Appreciative Inquiry, Asset Mapping, Co-production, Timebanking, Positive Deviance, Non-Violent Communication, Transactional Analysis and story-telling.

They engage fully with the associational life of the area; the clubs, groups and networks of unpaid enthusiasts contributing to the arts, sports, faith, environmental and leisure activities.

They bring to centre stage people’s strengths, stories, ideas, hopes, skills, passions and connections and get them to act upon them.

Slowly, broader community building themes emerge that form both a vision and a plan of action for the future for all involved.

Long term success depends on the continued use of an asset based lens through which to look at the world and effective collaborations with other community/person-centred preventative approaches.

Throughout the process statutory and voluntary agencies welcomed and hopefully participate in a ‘Community of Practice’ where are encouraged to shift their role from being innovators to enthusiasts for social innovations that are driven by the community.

Deficit based thinking can then be reserved for professionals charged with servicing what is left to do after the community has done what it does best.

The community is best placed to understand exactly what it is that local people care about and what they are prepared to do to change things in future. Asset Based Community Driven change is how ‘Ageing Well’ can harvest this potential contribution to a beautiful area like Torbay and significantly increase the possibilities for people to grow older better together.

“Others have seen what is and asked why.

I have seen what could be and asked why not?”

Pablo Picasso

(Produced in association with Martin Simon, December 2014,

1. Our definition of neighbourhoods

People are members of a variety of geographic communities - ie their local neighbourhood, town, and country, even continent. This post holder is expected to work at a neighbourhood level. For the purposes of this Programme the 3 towns of Torbay have been divided into 30 neighbourhoods. Each builder is expected to work in 2-4 of these depending on the population of older people, and the capacity of community activity already on the ground in each area.

We are currently seeking 2 Community Builders to work in the Neighbourhoods of:

• Paignton Town and Clifton and Maidenway
• Brixham

You do not have to express a preference for an area of work in your application. But you may wish to share your experiences of working in one or more of the above areas in your personal statement.

Torbay Community Development Trust, July 2017

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