Participatory Budgetting implmentation

The Well Northants programme aims to empower communities so they can become more connected, more resilient and improve their wellbeing and is key to addressing health inequalities. Public Health and the Communities Teams in West and North Northamptonshire Councils have recruited six community development workers who will work with communities who are most vulnerable to poor health outcomes, such as those who are living in areas of deprivation, isolation and 'inclusion health' groups, who are extremely vulnerable. The Community Development Workers will work with communities in their target areas to understand local needs and what is available locally already, and then work in partnership with those communities to develop interventions to improve health and wellbeing.

The six most deprived areas in the county were identified using IMD, 2019. This programme of work will be key to the levelling up agenda, and the anti-poverty strategy. Four community development workers will take a focus on these areas, two each. A further two workers, one for the West and one for the North will work with inclusion health groups. All of these workers have now started.

The initiative will include a grants programme to enable local communities to coproduce interventions that meet the identified needs of people in each community.

Grants

The CDWs will have access to a pot of money to issue grants to use to put in place interventions to address local need and these will be designed in partnership with communities. Empowering communities is central to this programme and so we are proposing to use participatory budgeting, which directly involves communities in making decisions about how to spend public money.

West and North Northamptonshire Councils do not have a current participatory budgeting policy and do not have any experience of issuing funding in this way. Therefore, we are looking for an expert in this way of working to support us to develop policy and processes for using participatory budgeting and to facilitate participatory budgeting workshops in the community, working closely with the community development workers. This is to specifically support the Well Northants project.

To apply you must complete a Request for Quotation Form and return it to chloe.gay@northnorthants.gov.uk