Neighbourhood Challenge

Neighbourhood Challenge was a one year funding opportunity from Nesta that supported community led change in 17 neighbourhoods across England. As Learning Partner to the programme, Icarus worked with each of the communities to help identify the outcomes they were working towards, and how their progress against these could be measured. This included training for community based researchers and an end of year analysis of progress overall. We also returned to each community one year later to assess the extent to which impacts had been sustained.

The project showed how community organisations – when equipped with the right skills, practical tools and small, catalytic amounts of money – can galvanise people to work together to create innovative responses to local priorities, particularly in neighbourhoods with low levels of social capital.

You can read more about what we learned through the programme in the Neighbourhood Challenge reports:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/project/neighbourhood-challenge