South West Exchanging Places: making Pride in Place work for neighbourhoods
On the 2nd July 2026, colleagues from local authorities, public partners, community organisations and residents met up in sunny Bristol to explore how they were approaching the Pride in Place programme (PiP) in their neighbourhoods. The South West Exchanging Places event was hosted by 3ni, the social value partnership working with local government and the wider public sector to improve and transform neighbourhoods across the country. It was a chance to engage in peer learning and shared expertise, with time for honest conversations on the opportunities and challenges that have been brought up as the PiP programme has taken shape in neighbourhoods across the South West.
The day started out in a community centre in Hartcliffe, a Pride in Place area at the southern edge of Bristol. Hartcliffe is cut off from much of the rest of the city, giving it a reputation as a “dead end area”. There is hope that the PiP programme can turn that around – bringing its strong community assets back into the limelight, and creating opportunities for the people who live there.
Dan Crowe, Director of 3ni, welcomed attendees by remarking on the present moment as one where neighbourhoods like Hartcliffe have, at last, been put at the centre of policy and practice. It is appropriate, observed Dan, that this event is taking place in Bristol, home to one of the most impressive and transformative resident-led projects in recent times: Ambition Lawrence Weston (ALW). Armed with just over £1m as part of the Big Local programme, the long-term national neighbourhood regeneration programme that closed just a few months ago, ALW have succeeded in weaving a strong social fabric where local people are active in shaping their own prospects and future. An inspiration, perhaps, for Pride in Place areas who want to deliver positive change that lasts.
Reflections from Bristol
The first speaker, Paul Smith, Chair of the Hartcliffe Pride in Place Neighbourhood Board, and Chief Executive of local housing association Elim Housing, gave some context to the neighbourhood in which Hartcliffe community centre is based. He explained that the local estate was originally planned with many facilities—cinema, swimming pool, tennis courts, sports pavilion, health facilities and a library—but most of these were never built, or significantly delayed. He stressed that even if they had been built, “simply building community centres does not reduce deprivation…decisions should be driven by residents rather than imposed from outside”. Paul explained that Pride in Place must do things differently: the £20million should be about “giving real power to local people” and that benefits should be for “residents rather than external organisations trying to extract money”.
This was something that Terry Black, Community Development Manager at Bristol City Council, agreed with. The way to do it, according to him and his team, is through genuine, meaningful community engagement. But, he explained, the tight timeframes of the national government-led PiP programme is putting a squeeze on it. Community engagement is needed so that the Neighbourhood Board, who are in charge of developing a plan for the area, get input, ideas and buy-in from all of the diverse groups of residents and neighbours who live in the area.
Despite pressures from the five month time frame, he described the council’s comprehensive approach led by local people to getting residents shaping and designing the neighbourhood plan. They have put on community forums and “drop-ins”, asking residents to describe what they want the community to be like in 10 years in five words. Having collected 533 responses so far, they have received around 100 ideas that will help shape the first year of investment. The council has also been working with partners such as Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership, funding community connectors to go out and talk to residents. Recognising that about 50 per cent of the population is under 18, they have worked with youth-focused organisations in particular, bringing groups of young people together to shape the plan based on their unique experiences.
Terry stresses that all of this is off the back of the council’s community development team working in Hartcliffe for nearly 10 years: it has taken a lot of time behind the scenes to build up the trust and respect of residents. This is something Bristol City Council has recognised is crucial to the success of PiP in Hartcliffe, and so has committed its own funding to support secretariat and engagement work without touching the areas’ PiP funding pot. This is a useful lesson for others considering neighbourhood plans, and what is needed to achieve genuine community involvement in shaping and designing them.
Community organising: how to go from top-down to bottom-up
Later that morning, Nick Gardham, Chief Executive of Community Organisers (CO), led a workshop on how to build capacity and leadership in neighbourhoods. He started out by identifying a key dilemma in the “Pride in Place” agenda: “it’s not enough to show that people are active and doing good things; the real issue is how to ensure people gain connections to leadership and power”. As things stand in neighbourhoods up and down the country, “when asked if they want to get involved, most [local people] say no, often because they think what’s the point? Nobody listens”.
For Pride in Place to work, for it to genuinely deliver change driven by and for the neighbourhoods it intends to serve, there needs to be leadership not only on Neighbourhood Boards but across communities. Otherwise, there is a risk that local people feel alienated and disconnected from yet another government programme – weakening trust in areas where it is already so low and failing to harness their latent energy, expertise and knowledge of what the area needs.
Community organisers trains community organisations and helps institutions work differently. It puts forward the important role of community organisers, whose job it is to galvanise people who live and work in an area, bringing them together to work on shared ambitions and priorities. Through this, community organisers help local people to realise their power and understand that, through their relationships and networks, they can have a genuine say on the issues that matter most to them.
Attendees heard from Nick that community organising starts with listening: it begins with one-to-one conversations with local people about their experiences of living in a place and what it means to them. Listening is so important because it gives a special opportunity to develop relationships with people who care about the same things. Meeting people individually, not just in groups, allows a network to be built of people who know each other, are accountable to each other, and want to build collective power. Nick talked through a framework that CO have created for organising grounded in listening and understanding: working with small groups and then larger groups, over a relatively long period.
But communities cannot organise themselves entirely alone; to build power in places, you need ways of working with external organisations. Mechanisms are needed for organisations and communities to organise together. This is where Sovereign Network Group (SNG) comes in. A housing association operating in London and the South of England, SNG has been working with CO to embed community organising in its work across the region.
Diane Humphries, Community Investment and Partnership Lead at SNG, stepped forward to explain how they have partnered with CO to develop an approach that facilitates community organising in neighbourhoods. Community Organising supports with the use of their data and insight to empower communities to drive forward joint priorities, strengthen local connections and foster a sense of belonging within neighbourhoods enabling strategic influence on the SNG customer experience. SNG wants to support community leadership, make decisions with residents and see communities themselves shaping priorities.
Communities know what they want, what they need, and that talking to each other is important. Working with community organisations, SNG has been working to train local people to lead conversations so that genuine partnerships can develop, building capacity and engagement rather than just services. They currently have 11 community organising organisations involved across the South West, with local people already engaged and training underway.
To continue to restore trust after listening and gaining residents’ ideas, Diane stressed that organisations like SNG have to follow through and act responsively – the aim is not about achieving pre-determined outcomes but shifting power so communities can decide what they want to do and what their future holds.
Nick closed the session by showing how community organising offers an approach which would support Pride in Place to deliver on building confidence and capacity at the grassroots. A community organising approach creates the conditions necessary for community leadership: it builds the relationships and networks necessary to cultivate and strengthen local leaders and community organisations. This is something that has been picked up by institutions: SNG shared examples of community organisations raising issues that they previously didn’t know how to bring to such a large public institution. This lets new ideas surface and gives space to work through difficult decisions and choices when they come up. This approach is not isolated but is slowly becoming mainstream: community organising is referenced as best practice for community engagement in the Pride in Place prospectus, rooting community organisers’ approach into the Government’s own ambition.
Ambition Lawrence Weston: A case study in community capacity building
After the morning sessions, participants hopped on a minibus and headed west. Lawrence Weston is in a different part of the city, out by the docks, but shares many of the same challenges as Hartcliffe. “We’re on the outskirts of Bristol, easily forgotten about, not really a destination”, explained Mark Pepper, Development Manager at Ambition Lawrence Weston (ALW).
Mark gave a thorough, informative presentation on the area’s experience of building resident confidence and capacity from its very beginning to the present day. He said that back when ALW first started in 2010, while the area faced some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country, local people knew that they were the ones most able to make a change: “what we didn’t want to do is what had been attempted in the past, when agendas have been parachuted in to tell us what’s good for us, what’s not good for us, what our problems area, what the solutions are”.
Funded by the NHS and led by a group of committed residents, Mark, his colleagues and neighbours set out to knock on the door of every single household in the area. They presented everyone with a consultation survey, asking what they felt was good about their neighbourhood, what not so good and what needed changing. Over time, two local residents were trained up to do the survey work, taking in around 800 responses. This formed the basis of a development plan that became ALW’s mission. That plan is not words on a page – it guides all activity, with main themes broken up into different working groups who are empowered and supported to deliver whatever they feel is right to achieve the mission.
Mark explained that ALW quickly realised that doing the “aspirational things” local people wanted to see would take some money. So they reviewed local assets, skills and expertise to identify whether they lent themselves to generating an income for the organisation. This took the form of another plan – a community development plan – that gave the local authority confidence to put forward Lawrence Weston to the Big Local programme in 2012. Awarding just over £1m over 10 years, Mark said that this money “kept the wheels on the organisation” and let the scope of its activity and ambition grow. The first major achievement was getting a lot of other residents involved – conducting additional surveys, doorstep conversations, drop-ins and family events. The money also brought more and more residents to the table, who wanted to be involved in deciding how it was spent and designing the projects it would make happen.
Across the consultation, 83per cent of respondents said they wanted a supermarket. The local authority had said it wasn’t possible, but ALW worked with a consultant who identified and interviewed five supermarkets that wanted to come to the area – choosing the current one based on employment conditions and food affordability.
Other major issues for local people were health and housing. With the health clinic under threat, ALW leveraged Big Local money to apply for £1.7m from Public Health England to retain and improve the GP surgery offer. Residents were involved in the design and furnishing of the GP service – giving them the facilities they want and deserve. ALW also began talking with housing associations, identifying land for development but setting the standards on the type of housing local people wanted – affordable, energy efficient and spacious enough for a family. Mark explained that “we were well in front of the local authority when it comes to sustainability of things…in our plan, any new development that comes to the area must have no gas boilers, must have air source heat pumps, solar panels, EV charging points.” These negotiations benefited the housing associations too – clear evidence of community engagement helped the planning process to take place smoothly.
What came through across the presentation was that, as the hard work started to lead to visible, material changes in the neighbourhood, there was a knock-on impact on the scale of community participation and engagement. The confidence, energy and motivation of residents grew from strength to strength, and more and more new faces wanted to come on board. This meant more people to deliver more for the community. Mark went through an impressive list of ALW’s achievements. Four new play parks built. A BMX track put in. Training for young people, employment support and jobs advisors provided. A new bus service up and running so people could access jobs and services in the rest of the city. And a brand new community centre, designed by local residents based on what they wanted their building to look like, feel and operate – based on the services they wanted delivered from it.
That centre, Ambition House, where the presentation was being held, is now a thriving hub with a fully packed schedule – hosting everything from kick-boxing and yoga to welfare advice, after schools clubs and gardening workshops. Local people are the ones to open up in the morning and lock the doors at the end of the day, something that is testament to the full ownership and agency they have over the space.
But what makes ALW really stand out, and what has led them to change the outlook of their neighbourhood for years to come, has been their approach to the twin crises of a changing climate and the rising cost of living. To make this point more tangible, attendees got in the minibus one last time to go and visit ALW’s community-owned wind turbine – the biggest of its kind in the UK.
Mark explained that ALW never meant to become climate activists, in fact, they had skirted around the subject to avoid sounding like “middle class sandal wearers.” But they soon realised that “community development and climate action is exactly the same thing.” Residents had been clear on the doorsteps and in surveys that saving money and reducing energy bills was an absolute priority. It just happened to be that the most “energy efficient things save carbon.” This led to a partnership with Bristol council that secured a 4.2MW solar farm as a community asset, receiving £150,000 on completion and an ongoing income, invested straight back to support residents with fuel costs.
This gave ALW a flavour of what community-owned renewable energy can offer. Standing in the shadow of the turbine, attendees got a real sense of the scale of the drive and ambition that has got ALW to where they are today. And not just the funding bids and bureaucratic processes completed but the extensive community engagement that took place to make it happen. Mark explained that this involved getting someone into every building, business and street in the neighbourhood to get a sense of what local residents thought about the idea. What came back was very high resident support for renewables.
After hard graft, in June 2023, the blades started turning on England’s biggest onshore turbine – owned by and for the community who made it happen. All the income it generates from clean electricity sales is reinvested back into the area, acting as a driver to regeneration and securing a solid income to improve the lives of people in the estate for years to come.
Ambition Lawrence Weston shows just what can be achieved when time, energy, resource and care is put into deep community engagement combined with the trust and resource in neighbourhoods to actually deliver on what matters most to them. The PiP programme, and how it is delivered in the South West and beyond, must learn from and build on the experiences of Lawrence Weston and other neighbourhoods who have been involved in previous regeneration initiatives to make sure that capacity is unlocked and retained at the grassroots, sowing the seeds of lasting change for years to come.
| What next? We’ll be putting on similar events when we’re back after the summer, including a study visit to the West Midlands. Stay tuned for more information. Stay in the loop with 3ni and get updates on future work, and please get in touch if you have things you’d like to share, or if you think we can help in any way. We’re committed to sharing our learning, and putting on events that are of benefit to network members. |
Pictures by Caitlin Sullivan Photography