Building effective and sustainable partnerships between the voluntary and statutory sector
Health Equalities
With The National Lottery Community Fund
We are supporting The National Lottery Community Fund’s Health Equality Grantees to develop effective and sustainable partnerships between the voluntary and community sector, the NHS, and local authorities, to improve health and wellbeing, reduce health inequalities and empower communities.
Through the Health Equalities programme, The National Lottery Community Fund has awarded £6.9 million to support local areas to develop effective and sustainable partnerships between the voluntary and community sector, the NHS and local authorities to improve health and wellbeing, reduce health inequalities and empower communities. Thanks to National Lottery players, these partnerships have the potential to bring about significant change, promoting the role of the voluntary sector and the value of cross-sector partnerships.
The National Lottery Community Fund and the Innovation Unit are working together to:
-
- Support the organisations and grant holders who are looking to address health inequalities in their local areas
- Connect and convene the Health Equality partnerships to generate and share learning
- Communicate this learning to wider audiences
By sharing learning and insights relating to tackling health inequalities, we aim to support partnerships to build a legacy beyond their National Lottery funding and point towards longer-term systems change.
Learning and support partnership
Innovation Unit were the learning and support partner for the development phase (phase 1 during 2021-22) and have also been successful in the commissioning for phase 2, and will therefore continue to support 11 grantees until January 2026.
Our work involves a combination of bespoke 1-1 support for each grantee, and a series of learning activities bringing them together as a cohort to share experiences, gain support and develop their practice. We will also be holding external events open to the wider sector.
As learning partner, we’re exploring the system conditions, and methods and approaches, which support effective and sustainable partnerships focused on tackling health inequalities, and the extent to which these support the translation of ambitions to impact.
Together with the grantees, we’re learning about the role of factors including:
-
- Relationships, infrastructure and governance
- Level and area of focus – the difference between a targeted approach (e.g. through the lens of a health condition and/or community) and a more generalist approach (e.g. through the lens of partnership mechanisms)
- Community engagement and co-production
- Evidence generation and usage
As support partner, we’re working with the grantees to see where we can add most value to their work, offering our insight and practical experience to support with:
-
- Coaching and reflective practice
- Evaluation and learning.
- Strategic and organisational development
- Communications
- Working with partners and communities
Insights and resources
This web page is a home for the learning and resources generated through the programme and will be updated regularly as our work continues. Here you can find event recordings, blogs, and frameworks and guidance (including the storybook covering all of the learning from the development phase). We hope this is a useful repository for anyone else looking to tackle health inequalities and develop effective cross-sector partnerships.
For more information please Email Lizzie Cain
Blogs
Health in the community: VCFSE-led partnerships tackling health inequalities
How do you design a structure for partnering across the NHS, local authorities and community groups?
Trust Takes Time: lessons for VCSE organisations partnering with the NHS
Who Evaluates the Evaluation? Grassroots knowledge and experience of evaluation
Building Bridges: Growing Community Sector Capacity in Health Equity Partnerships
What’s the Endgame?: What does legacy look like for 12 projects working to tackle health inequalities?
Learning Resources
Top tips
Influencing and working with the NHS as a VCSE organisation
Printable activity
Features of successful partnerships
Shared challenges
Engaging the NHS as a voluntary / community sector organisation: shared challenges and how others are overcoming them
Powerpoint Download
Storytelling framework to help you share compelling stories about any topic
Theory of Change tool
A framework for helping you to think about complexity and adaptive change, and a tool for navigating it
External communications
Toolkits, guides and resources to help you communicate with others about your work
Events
Stronger together: Insights into forging deeper relationships between health and the voluntary sector, October 2024
On 23 October 2024, over 200 people joined us to explore learning from the Health Equalities programme to date, and collectively share and explore insights into forging deeper relationships between health and the voluntary sector. We heard from a range of Health Equality Grantees about their experiences of cross-sector partnership so far, their learnings, and their advice for others, and explored together what this means in our own place.
To watch the full event recording or to just catch up with specific elements of the event, please go to our Vimeo
Why and how ICSs should partner with the voluntary sector to tackle health inequalities, March 2022
On the 22nd March 2022 cross-sector leaders and their learning partners came together to explore the role the voluntary sector can play in helping to tackle health inequalities in neighbourhoods, places and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs). The event was a collaboration between the Innovation Unit, The National Lottery Community Fund, The King’s Fund and the Institute for Voluntary Action Research.
Opportunities ahead: Health anchors and the VCSE sector, January 2022
This event brought together NHS organisations working locally to tackle health inequalities with VCSE partners to explore how they can best work together in partnership. It spotlights The National Lottery Community Fund’s Health Equality funded partnerships and explores examples of promising practice and different ways in which partners have worked together.
Project team
Lizzie Cain
Head of Learning
Julia Slay
Senior Associate
Rose Minshall
Senior Innovation Consultant