Social Homes for Manchester are launching a powerful film short today created by women community leaders in Moss Side and Wythenshawe together with On Our Radar.

Watch: What is the City but the People?

The documentary begins with archive footage of a promotional film released by Manchester Corporation in 1946 about plans for the redevelopment of Manchester in the post-war era. The resonance with the present day is striking as the clipped-voiced narrator discusses the relationship between health and housing and plans for the redevelopment of Hulme and Wythenshawe.

Community leaders across the city have been bringing residents and community groups together since 2018 to discuss the impacts of the developer-led model for housing and regeneration on local communities. People negotiating challenging circumstances of their own have found the time, capacity, and courage to organise for better outcomes for their local areas, and to join forces to talk about how private capture of public land, housing, and community assets is compounding poverty and inequality, breaking up families, and pushing lower-income households out of the city.

The Manchester Local Plan

The Local Plan is one of the most important new policies under development in the city of Manchester yet ask most residents what they think about it and they will look at you in bewilderment! Planning can be technical, complex, and often (shhh…) a bit boring!

Four amazing and motivated community teams have overcome these barriers to begin to learn about this process and have a voice to ensure their local area priorities are heard. Collectively, they are working together through the Manchester Social Housing Commission to represent the needs of communities across the city whose interests have historically not been put centre stage by the planning department.

MPCAN consults residents of Ancoats, Collyhurst, and Miles Platting on local area priorities, Sept 2024

Residents and community leaders from Hulme, Miles Platting, Moss Side, and Wythenshawe have drawn on several years of local organising as well as more recent community workshops September – December 2024 to draw together local priorities for housing and local development. They presented these priorities to the Manchester Social Housing Commission in December and will be meeting with senior planning officers at Manchester City Council later this week to discuss their proposals.

Community leaders from Hulme, Miles Platting, Moss Side & Wythenshawe present to Commissioners

Working in partnership with the Commission, these local area teams are also advocating for neighbourhood plan pilots in at least two of these four areas (something Manchester has historically resisted); and for the introduction of ‘special planning areas’ in places where local communities have been decimated by particular types of development (student housing, university expansion, demolitions followed by developments for private rent and sale) and need restrictions to be introduced.

A new timetable for publication of the draft local plan has just been announced with an 8-week consultation due to commence in summer 2025.

Get involved!

Community representatives on the Manchester Social Housing Commission will be organising monthly film screenings and briefings on what you can do in your own local neighbourhood to support this growing movement for more social rent housing and a stronger say for communities over what happens to their local area.

If you would like to work with us to organise an event in your neck of the woods please sign up here.

• Gentrification
• housing
• housing crisis
• Hulme
• Miles Platting
• Social housing
• Wythenshawe

Grassroots communities in the lowest income areas are places of solidarity, hope, determination, creativity and resilience. These are the communities we work in and seek to strengthen. This abridged version of our strategic plan sets out how our strategic priorities and objectives for the next three years are shaped by our analysis of the current context for our work and our current stage of development.

Gendered poverty and financial resilience

There has not been a consistent period of poverty reduction in the UK for over twenty years. Poverty is deepening; six million people were in ‘very deep poverty’ in 2021/22, the poorest of these ‘having an income that was 59% below the poverty line. The gap has increased by around two-thirds over the past 25 years’ (JRF, 2024: 8).

Poverty is gendered: women are more likely to live in poverty than men. Over the past decade, income stagnation, cuts to social security and public services, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis, have all had disproportionate impacts on women and children (WBG, 2023). Disabled women, single mothers, and Black and minority ethnic women have been some of the worst affected (JRF, 2024; WBG, 2023).

Housing costs are significant: ‘In 2021/22, more than four in ten social renters (43%) and around a third of private renters (35%) were in poverty after housing costs. Getting housed is an even more significant issue. There are over 17,000 households on the waiting list for social housing in Manchester and the City Council spent over £39 million on temporary accommodation in 2021-22 (Live tables on rents, lettings nad tenancies 2023).

According to the Women’s Budget Group, individual financial autonomy is the best guarantee of financial resilience. However, the best guarantees of financial autonomy are adequate employment and social security support, meaning low-income women frequently don’t have this autonomy (WBG, 2023: 1).

Regional inequality

The geography of UK income inequality has hardly changed since 1997, ‘poor places have tended to remain poor while rich places have stayed rich’. At the same time, ‘spatial disparities in child poverty have increased, along with a shift in the geographical concentration of child poverty’ (Resolution Foundation, 2024: 4). Since 2014, poverty has increased most in urban areas of the North West and West Midlands with ‘all 20 local authorities with the largest percentage point increase in child poverty’ in these two regions. An astonishing 48% of children in Manchester and 46% of children in Oldham were families living in poverty in 2022-23 (Resolution Foundation, 2024: 4). Although poverty has increased the most in these areas, in 2021/22: ‘the West Midlands had the highest rate of poverty at 27%, followed by the North East and London (both 25%), Yorkshire and the Humber, the East Midlands and the North West (all 23%)’ (JRF, 2024: 14).

Disillusionment and division

Community Savers have a strong history of transforming disillusionment into hope and agency in the neighbourhoods where we are based. This has never been more needed.

The impacts of deepening poverty, inequality and uncertainty have been compounded by the shrinking of space for local democratic engagement, voice, and influence since the 1980s, and there has been a vacuum in political representation of the most disadvantaged. At the same time, there has been rapid demographic change linked to globalisation, but less money available for deep and long-term community development work.  Cuts to public services and the closing or redevelopment of valued community spaces mean there is a lack of appropriate community-designed and governed physical spaces for people to come together, access information, build relationships, and ‘be well’ (Local Trust, 2019).

Recent research by ‘Hope not Hate’ finds that 50% of the people they surveyed said they were pessimistic about the future and more people thought they would be worse off in their lives than their parents. They conclude that ‘there is a growing mood of pessimism and declinism amongst the population and this is leading to deteriorating attitudes to democracy and the political system’. This opens up space for extremism in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the UK. They also find that the ‘radical right’ are now rejecting action on climate change as a central strand of their populist agenda (Hope not Hate, 2024).

These are trends that Community Savers leaders have been discussing since 2018 (well before the pandemic) and which we reported on in our 2020 “Our Story So Far” report. Together with CLASS, and under the mentorship of Shack/Slum Dwellers International in South Africa and Kenya, we believe we have built an approach that directly engages with these challenges: rebuilding self-esteem and trust between people and social groups at a neighbourhood level; fostering a renewed belief in the power of shared values and collective action; and mobilising behind the mutually reinforcing agendas of social, economic, and climate justice.

Community Savers and CLASS have come a long way since Mums Mart visited the SDI South African Alliance in 2017. Mums Mart pioneered the first savings group and have since mobilised groups across Greater Manchester and Sheffield, with leaders requesting the formation of a support agency in 2019. Since CLASS gained charity registration in March 2020, and despite successive global and national crises, we have built our own effective and impactful ‘alliance’, inspired by SDI community federation-professional support agency alliances across the Global South.

We are a women-led movement for poverty action and urban transformation. Every year we carry out an in-depth evaluation against our Theory of Change; and the Community Savers Leadership engage in strategic review, reflection, and planning. This is how we have agreed the below direction for 2025-2028.

Please read our Theory of Change in tandem with this strategic plan.

Strategic priorities and objectives 2025-2028

SP1: To be recognised as leaders in achieving women-led savings and financial resilience in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods we will:

• Strengthen the membership, leadership, and funding base of ‘Women in Community Action Arbourthorne’ as a first savings group in Sheffield.
• Support Community Savers Leaders to engage in at least four learning exchange visits per year, sharing learning, building relationships and supporting the establishment of new groups.
• Develop the financial inclusion and literacy offer of established savings groups.
• Secure funding to develop a ‘Community Savers App’ for digital savings tracking.
• Strengthen our impact, reporting, and communications, and identify an independent evaluator.

SP2: To become recognised experts in advancing gender-conscious neighbourhood transformation in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods we will:

• Increase the number of grassroots women leaders involved in savings-based community action, who feel well-supported and have increased voice and influence over local issues.
• Deliver annual Community Savers skills-based training programmes in response to the needs, interests, and priorities of the leadership.
• Support the development of neighbourhood-wide partnerships to realise ambitious agendas for reducing disadvantage and increasing wellbeing.
• Work with savings groups in at least three new neighbourhoods to create new conversations and develop transformative coproduction partnerships with public/private/voluntary sector agencies and authorities.
• Test out an adaptation of SDI’s survey, profiling and mapping approach in at least one neighbourhood to create a community-owned database that supports collective action and advocacy.

SP3: To establish and consolidate at least one successful city-wide movement for accelerated delivery of sustainable homes for social rent we will:

• Secure longer-term funding for the Social Homes for Manchester (SH4M) coalition with evidence of local and national policy change that benefits low-income households and communities.
• Publish a set of public scrutiny web pages to provide local citizen coalitions with ward-level data on housing need and development proposals.
• Create a network of citizen coalitions across the cities of Manchester and Sheffield who can hold their political representatives (local and national), local authorities, and other housing providers to account for the availability and quality of social rent homes.
• Link local housing action work with national campaigns for housing and planning reform through engagement with the Homes4Us alliance, and political representation.

SP4: To proactively apply principles of equality, equity, diversity and inclusion throughout our governance, operations, and practice we will:

• Support affiliates to implement learning gained through workshops on diversity and inclusion.
• Visit diverse groups and projects to encourage engagement beyond those already socially connected and encourage diverse and less confident members to try out leadership roles.
• Carry out an equality monitoring survey across our leadership and board and develop a strategy to address gaps in representation.
• Carry out a staff reflection on internal operations and procedures at CLASS; including staff and volunteer recruitment and communications strategies to identify ways to increase equality of opportunity, equity in outcomes/impacts for the most multiply disadvantaged social groups, and ensuring our work and communications are inclusive and accessible.
• Co-design and implement a new internship opportunity for women with disabilities or from minority ethnic backgrounds, aged 18-35 and living in low-income neighbourhoods focused on gaining experience of the CLASS board, staff practice, and leaders’ community action. 

SP5. To acquire the financial and human resources that we need to progress these strategic priorities we will:

• Deepen relationships with existing funding partners, attracting ongoing investment by sharing strategic learning and impact evidence more widely through improved communications.
• Attract at least one 3–5-year core costs grant from a new charitable trust/foundation partner.
• Secure funding for a ‘Movement Coordinator’ role and a team of place-based community facilitators and through this, support employment opportunities for low-income women in the neighbourhoods where we work.

References

• Greater Manchester Savers (2020), Our Story So Far.
• Hope not Hate (2024), State of Hate 2024: Pessimism, decline and the rising radical right.
• Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2024), UK Poverty 2024.
• Local Trust (2019) Skittled out? The collapse and revival of England’s social infrastructure.
• Resolution Foundation (2024) Uneven ground: Assessing the state of UK geographic economic
  inequality facing the new Government.
• Women’s Budget Group (2023) Women’s Budget Group Submission to the Financial Resilience APPG, June 2023.

• 2025-2028
• Strategy

Later this week we launch a new three-year strategy for the Community Savers-CLASS alliance. First, we kick the new year off with a look back at our achievements in 2024...

Women leading social change

Community Savers is a women-led poverty action movement: people of all gender identities are actively welcomed to participate while we follow a principle of majority women leadership. This is because women living on low incomes are the worst affected by multiple disadvantage, they are usually at the heart of community life weaving the social fabric, yet their voices often have the least influence in local decisions.

Throughout 2024, Community Savers and Women of Wythenshawe leaders engaged in ongoing skills development from the basics for running local groups like financial management and accounting; health and safety; first aid; and building an inclusive approach for people with diverse needs; to safeguarding, mental health and neurodiversity; and understanding incorporation.

Wythenshawe SEND Mums training with The Grange

Wythenshawe SEND mums developed a new partnership with The Grange specialist school and learning centre, becoming certified trainers able to deliver SEND awareness training within Wythenshawe schools to improve the learning environment for neurodivergent children.  WOW groups worked in partnership with Safespots and Survivors to create a lived experience-led specialist training portal for public sector workers raising awareness about ten different forms of abuse and the support diverse women need (and often don’t receive).

Neighbourhood organising

Arbourthorne

Women in Community Action Arbourthorne (WICAA) took their community action to the next stage by bringing local residents together to analyse strengths and challenges in the neighbourhood and start creating an action plan for the work ahead. Starting out as three motivated mums wanting to clean up the area, Annie, Amanda and Georgie took to the streets with litter pickers every Thursday, knocking on doors where people seemed as if they might need help with their front garden. They listened to stories of damp, mould and overcrowding; gangs and anti-social behaviour, and decided to bring residents together to talk about what needed to change. CLASS will be working with WICAA to support local groups to explore formation of a new Arbourthorne Community Network in 2025.

Hulme

Ageing Well in Place in Hulme went from strength to strength, expanding work with older and vulnerable tower block tenants into a second block in partnership with Turn2Us through ‘Meredith Matters’. Tenants gave powerful testimonies about the particular experience of living in a one bedroom flat in a high rise inner city block at our September showcase; sharing how their adaptation of a “naturally occurring retirement community model” from New York is transforming social relations in Aquarius. Community partners have now developed a three-year strategy for mobilising five blocks working with housing providers, health and social care services, Manchester City Council, and the universities to achieve their goal of older tower block tenants “living well and with dignity in the place they call home”.

Miles Platting and Collyhurst South

Members of Miles Platting Community and Age-friendly Network (MPCAN) have been transforming the local landscape through their GM Green Spaces-funded wildlife corridor project which has included planting over 100 trees, saving 9 mature trees from development-related felling, creating a new pocket park, and reinvigorating a network of community gardens.

Growing together at Chippenham Community Gardens

Working together with Manchester City Council and Jigsaw Homes they have also successfully secured a commitment for at least 100 new homes for social rent across three sites in Miles Platting.

In partnership with St Cuthberts C of E Parochial Church Council, they have successfully registered a new CIO called St Cuthberts Communities Together which has a new board comprising a mix of PCC members and local community leaders. The trustees are working with project managers from Participate and Locality to take the project beyond feasibility to develop a new business plan aimed at attracting investment partners in 2025. The concept plans prioritise a long-term worship space combined with a multi-purpose social centre, health and wellbeing services, community laundrette, and hopefully also some housing for social rent.

Watch: Rev Ellie Trimble explain how the St Cuthberts development will put right historical wrongs

Wythenshawe

Wythenshawe Central Network is a new resident-led network that brings together tenants, residents, community groups and projects in the “Wythenshawe Central” area bordered by the M56 and the airport. This joins together members from three council wards Northenden, Sharston, and Benchill, to identify priorities for the local area and develop partnerships for achieving improvements to local facilities and services. It was catalysed by the Women of Wythenshawe housing action group after the network prioritised increased homes for social rent including for women fleeing domestic abuse, and women with disabilities in their collective consultation work throughout 2023. First step for 2025: establish a participatory development panel for the Wythenshawe Town Centre redevelopment!

The Manchester Local Plan

The Local Plan is one of the most important new policies under development in the city of Manchester yet ask most residents what they think about it and they will look at you in bewilderment! Planning can be technical, complex, and often (shhh…) a bit boring!

Four amazing and motivated community teams have overcome these barriers to begin to learn about this process and have a voice to ensure their local area priorities are heard. Collectively, they are working together through the Manchester Social Housing Commission to represent the needs of communities across the city whose interests have historically not been put centre stage by the planning department.

MPCAN consults residents of Ancoats, Collyhurst, and Miles Platting on local area priorities, Sept 2024

Residents and community leaders from Hulme, Miles Platting, Moss Side, and Wythenshawe have drawn on several years of local organising as well as more recent community workshops September – December 2024 to draw together local priorities for housing and local development. They presented these priorities to the Manchester Social Housing Commission in December and will be meeting with senior planning officers at Manchester City Council in January to discuss their proposals.

Community leaders from Hulme, Miles Platting, Moss Side & Wythenshawe present to Commissioners

Working in partnership with the Commission, these local area teams are also advocating for neighbourhood plan pilots in at least two of these four areas (something Manchester has historically resisted); and for the introduction of ‘special planning areas’ in places where local communities have been decimated by particular types of development (student housing, university expansion, demolitions followed by developments for private rent and sale) and need restrictions to be introduced.

A new timetable for publication of the draft local plan has just been announced with an 8-week consultation due to commence in summer 2025.

This policy will determine what can be built where across the city for (approximately) the next ten years – you might want to take a look!

Increasing delivery of sustainable social rent homes

Community Savers and CLASS are founding members of the Social Homes for Manchester coalition which launched the Manchester Social Housing Commission in July 2024. The Commission had to organise fast and effectively to keep pace with events including a new national government and consultations on both the national planning policy framework and the right to buy launched by the end of the year.

Download the Commission’s policy brief: Why We Need Sustainable Homes for Social Rent

Thirza Asanga Rae of GM Tenants Union and Zoe Marlow of Wythenshawe Central and Dandelion Savers gave powerful testimonies in the House of Lords in November to launch the Commission’s five urgent national policy asks.

Listen again to Thirza and Zoe here (From 04:32)

Without national action on these policy areas now, cities like Manchester will not be able to make any significant impact to reduce the housing emergency at a local level. There are now 18,000 households on the waiting list for a social rented home in the city of Manchester alone, yet between 2012-2022 only 2% of new build homes in Manchester were for social rent.

Please join the campaign here: there is lots more work to do in 2025!

• Community Savers
• gendered poverty
• Manchester
• neighbourhood orgnaising
• Poverty Action
• Sheffield
• social change
• Social housing
• women leaders

Zoe Marlow and Thirza Asanga-Rae put the human cost of the housing crisis centre-stage on Wednesday through powerful lived experience testimonies at the launch of the Manchester Social Housing Commission’s first policy brief in the House of Lords.

Download “Why We Need More Sustainable Homes for Social Rent”

Zoe, who is a local Wythenshawe leader at Dandelion Savers and Wythenshawe Central community network spoke about the crippling impacts of the bedroom tax which has led to her being charged for two extra bedrooms (after her children moved out) and living under threat of eviction from rent arrears. Like many in her situation, she has not been offered an alternative property to move into, despite also having developed two long term conditions that mean she cannot manage the stairs. As she shared at the Commission’s parliamentary reception:

“I didn’t ask to have a spare bedroom… I can’t afford to heat a three-bedroom house”

Thirza, Organiser with GM Tenants Union, Director of Windrush Millenium Centre in Moss Side, and mum of four, shared the appalling experiences of damp, mould, leaks and hazardous housing over many years that spurred her into action with the Tenants Union. She said of one property:

“There were two leaks, one from the roof into the bedroom where my boys slept – all under 5 or 6 at the time – and leaks from the bathroom into the kitchen. I would complain and complain…they would replaster…and, you who lives there knows that they haven’t fixed it, they haven’t got to the root of the problem. There was water leaking on to electric plug sockets where my youngest liked to sit while I was cooking”.

Zoe and Thirza attended the session as Commissioners to make five urgent policy asks of Members of Parliament and the House of Lords together with: Right Reverend Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester; Associate Professor Stuart Hodkinson Associate Professor, University of Leeds and author of Safe as Houses; and Venus Galarza, Policy Manager for Shelter.

“LISTEN AGAIN”: Hear Zoe, Thirza, Stuart and Venus speaking at the House of Lords

Five urgent policy asks:

1. Reinvest in Social Rent: The recent announcement of £500 million in additional funding is a drop in the ocean compared to need. The Commission’s policy brief cites evidence that estimates £14.6bn in capital funding is needed each year over a ten year period to meet social rented housing need.

2. Reform Planning to Prioritise Sustainable Social Rent in Affordable Housing Delivery: The Commission recommends that government clearly distinguishes between Social Rent and other ‘affordable housing’ tenures, alongside the reinstatement of national statutory planning targets for social rent and ending the current developer viability opt-out, and allowing local plans to go beyond minimum building regulations in requiring better energy standards and ecological design.

3. Rethink the Right to Buy: Government must go further than reducing the discounts and suspend the RTB/ Right to Acquire for existing and new tenants with a view to outright abolition to prevent the further loss of social rented homes that also acts as a disincentive to new supply.

4. Retrofit long-term empty homes for sustainable social rent: Local authorities should be empowered to bring the large number of long-term empty homes back into use as social rented housing retrofitted to high energy standards through targeted grant funding, stronger compulsory purchase powers, tougher and mandatory council tax premiums, and the abolition of VAT on refurbishment.

5. Embed Community Voice and Ownership into the Planning System: Communities and their locally elected representatives should have stronger statutory powers within the planning system to properly shape the investment decisions that are made about their own neighbourhoods, with longer-term funding to support neighbourhood planning and community-led development.

Without national action on these policy areas now, cities like Manchester will not be able to make any significant impact to reduce the housing emergency at a local level. There are now 18,000 households on the waiting list for a social rented home in the city of Manchester alone, yet between 2012-2022 only 2% of new build homes in Manchester were for social rent.

To find out more about the Manchester Social Housing Commission visit: https://www.socialhomes4mcr.org.uk/commission

To get involved and find out more about what you can do to support the campaign for national policy action and local action on the housing crisis visit: https://www.socialhomes4mcr.org.uk/get-involved

On Thursday 26^th September, tenant organisers in Hulme tower blocks presented a showcase of their amazing work to improve the lives of older and vulnerable people to a room full of public sector and university leaders keen to learn from their achievements and understand how they can support this important work going forwards.

Bernie Enright, Director of Adult Social Services at Manchester City Council, shared how she was impressed by the way this approach involves tenants taking the lead in prioritising their needs. Abid Mumtaz, Head of Commissioning for Adult Social Care, encouraged the team to raise the profile of their work far and wide so others could learn how to take a community-led approach to securing the rights and dignity of older people living at height.

Bernie Enright & Abid Mumtaz (centre) learn about the Naturally Occuring Retirement Community in Hulme.

Hulme tenants’ innovative Naturally Occuring Retirement Community or ‘NORC’ approach built on a series of exchanges with Muungano Wa Wanavijiji which Tina Cribbin describes in her blog Survey’s for Social Justice where activists shared how they achieved change by bringing their communities together around shared priorities in Nairobi’s informal settlements, and led their own data gathering and neighbourhood profiling to show the numbers of people in need compared to the services and infrastructure currently provided by the state.

WATCH: Dr Mark Hammond present on impacts and learning from Hulme’s first Naturally Occuring Retirement Community initiative

WATCH: Lucy, Lynne, Anne and Abby on bringing tenants together for Meredith Matters

What was the catalyst?

The work began at Hopton Court tower block during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when Tina Cribbin and Anne Finnegan at On Top of the World Project became seriously concerned about the isolation of older people, with people dying alone in their flats with no end of life care, and the high numbers of older people falling through the gaps between health, housing, and social care support. From there, CLASS supported tenants to form a new group called Hopton Hopefuls and develop a partnership with Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing – MICRA (University of Manchester), Cornbrook Medical Practice, and One Manchester. The first step was in depth interviews with tenants and to develop a basic understanding of the challenges facing older and disabled tenants living in poverty at the block.

Hopton Hopefuls then worked with CLASS to co-design community research training and a tenant-led survey, successfully achieving the highest response rate to any consultation carried out at the block because it was tenants talking to tenants with 54% of tenants participating. Over time, Hopton Hopefuls were able to expand to become Aquarius Community Savers in order to bring together tenants from across different tower blocks and other areas of the Aquarius estate in Hulme. Together with Adult Social Care, One Manchester, MICRA and the Manchester School of Architecture, tenants were able to develop a new partnership called Ageing Well in Place in Hulme which focused on adapting a model from New York high rise called Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities or NORCs.

What is a NORC?

A common characterisation is: “A living environment or area that contains a large concentration of older adults that has happened ‘naturally’ over time usually within high-rise tower block accommodation.”

NORCs have four common features but work differently in each place depending on the local context:

• Older people are in the lead of programme design and implementation working through co-creation partnerships with housing and other public providers
• On-site paid professional staff co-create with tenants and coordinate the work to ensure effective care and support for older people
• A neighbourhood model for integrated health, social care, social inclusion and housing support and services – the focus is on drawing services inwards within a particular place and providing on-site support and services which results in closer working relationships across different agencies
• Transformative social spaces underpin the potential for everything else to thrive: gnificant increases in informal social interaction create some of the most significant added value of the NORC over and above increased access to services; encourages preventative action, and is highly beneficial for mental health and wellbeing.

Participants were presented with a summary of the key impacts of working through the NORC approach

Building on all the success at Hopton Court, Aquarius Community Savers, On Top of the World Project and CLASS, were able to develop a new partnership with Turn2Us: a national charity focused on poverty reduction and financial resilience who also aim to reduce the cost of care for people living in poverty by co-creating local programmes led by communities. Meredith Matters has drawn on all the expertise at Hopton Court, with a tenant-led project team bringing their experiences across to a neighbouring block, Meredith Court, to carry out a second survey identifiying the particular challenges there and mentoring Meredith tenants on how to build community and develop an action plan. The three major overarching challenges in the Meredith findings are Health Inequalities, the Cost of Living and Social Isolation. Mirroring Hopton their first aims are to set up a tenant committee and a breakfast club to create a regular space where people can come for social interaction and access information and signposting support.

Lucy sharing her experiences of living at Meredith Court and becoming part of the Meredith Matters team

One Manchester were also able to present on their own commitments to supporting this work including a full replacement of the lifts at Hopton Court making sure they stop at every floor and the renovation of a ground floor three bedroom flat into a tenant governed community space.

What next?

WATCH: Next steps for Ageing Well in Place in Hulme

As well as sharing learning widely and encouraging professionals to take a ‘transformative’ rather than ‘weak’ form of approach to co-production when designing services, projects and programmes, this showcase event also had the aim of establishing a basket fund. With public services in crisis, our aim is to create a new approach to funding that brings together the Universities, Manchester Local Care Organisation/Manchester City Council, and key local private sector organisations into a mutually beneficial partnership with low costs and high benefits to each investor.

This will enable Ageing Well in Place in Hulme to take forward a three year programme of work that will see the NORC spread across all six tower blocks in the Aquarius estate and begin to build community associations and lay foundations for a NORC approach in the nearby St Georges estate to continue to achieve our most important of aims: to ensure that older tower block tenants living in Hulme can live well and with dignity in the place they call home.

• Ageing
• Ageing Well in Place
• Aquarius estate
• Austerity
• Health inequalities
• Hopton Court
• Hulme
• Meredith Court
• Older People in Deprivation
• St Georges estate