Evaluating Camden’s Community Champions

A resident-led approach to improving health and wellbeing

The Backdrop

Camden Council has a vision to empower residents to lead changes that improve local health and wellbeing. In 2020, inspired by successful community champion models in other London boroughs, they developed a pilot approach that recruited local people as volunteers to tackle inequalities, improve health and wellbeing, and address local issues of concern.

The Council selected three areas of social housing in the Borough with below average levels of economic activity and higher levels of poor health. Rather than ‘siloing’ the programme as simply a means of disseminating public health messages, they wanted to enable local people to identify and tackle their own concerns and needs.

After nearly four years of operation, Camden Council sought to understand the impact of the Community Champions programme and  draw out learning that could be applied to Camden Council’s future neighbourhoods work.

What we did

We were appointed as the evaluation and learning partner for the Camden Community Champions programme in October 2023. In addition to uncovering insights into the work, and answering the main questions of the impact of the work, our approach aimed to build learning capacity, through interactions and sensemaking workshops with the commissioners, the project coordinators, the organisation leads and most importantly, the residents. 

We began by developing learning questions with the core delivery team of commissioners, hosts(local community organisations selected to implement the programme in each area),  and coordinators(individuals employed by the host organisations to engage the residents, and facilitate the champions programme). We then conducted site visits, read background documents and collected stories from programme participants,including 15 stories from community members, two from partners, interviews with coordinators, host organisations, and key Camden Council staff. .

To analyse our findings, we developed a new evaluation framework to understand what makes communities healthy, vibrant, and self-sustaining. It considered four key areas: Health and Wellbeing, Individual Capabilities and Agency, Community Assets and Empowerment, and Wider System Influence.

We shared our emerging insights in ‘sense-making workshops’ with key stakeholders to support collective learning.

Impact and Learning

The new evaluation framework we developed has complemented Camden Council’s existing focus on the wider determinants of health for their health and wellbeing objectives. We aimed to provide a structure that helped the Council locate and understand how various factors within these wider determinants played out in the Community Champions programme, from both collective and individual perspectives. By bridging individual experiences with community-level changes, our framework offered our stakeholders a more nuanced tool for assessing the holistic impact of community-based health initiatives, reinforcing their understanding of how hyperlocal, resident-led approaches can address complex health challenges.

To put this framework into practice and gain deeper insights, our evaluation process included facilitating sensemaking workshops across the three areas, creating valuable opportunities for joined-up working and shared learning. This collaborative approach has been significant in understanding what the future of this project could look like, and in comprehending the impact and learning from a community project with diverse host organisations and geographical contexts.

This collaborative process has provided valuable insights into the Community Champions programme’s impact and offers potential avenues for enhancing community-centred health initiatives in Camden in the future.

The Camden Community Champions pilot additionally has shown that investing in resident-led initiatives can facilitate positive change in health and wellbeing, when given adequate time, support, and resources to develop. This learning will be invaluable as Camden Council continues to evolve its approach to community engagement and neighbourhood development, ultimately contributing to a more equitable and thriving Camden for all residents.

Our evaluation revealed that the Community Champions programme has had significant positive impacts, particularly in improving mental health and community connections among participants. The programme has developed individual capabilities such as confidence and leadership skills, while also enhancing community assets including public spaces and support networks.

Some of the key enablers included the persistent and creative efforts of coordinators, the flexibility provided by commissioners, the infrastructure offered by host organisations, and the growing participation and confidence of community members.

The evaluation surfaced that hyperlocal, resident-led approaches require a significant investment of time and continuity of support to nurture community leadership and empower lasting change. Three years is often not enough to translate projects into sustained community-led action with measurable health impacts, particularly in areas lacking existing social cohesion. 

It also revealed the importance of balancing structure with flexibility. While the original model was based on health champion programmes, Camden’s approach allowed for more community-led initiatives. This flexibility enabled responses tuned to hyperlocal contexts and cultural nuances, with no two areas following identical paths. However, the lack of a consistent methodology or theory of change across sites made it challenging to compare outcomes and demonstrate impact systematically.

Looking forward, we identified the need for a more intentional community development methodology beginning with listening and developing relationships, greater institutional support to recognise and match residents’ efforts, and the importance of supporting transitions toward sustainable community-led models. 

Our evaluation work was not without challenges, such as time pressures and the inability to hold a cross-area sense-making workshop with champions as initially planned. However, being on on-ground and speaking to the coordinators as well as participants helped us to overcome these barriers, build relationships within the communities, and gain trust with the participants, with the goal of ensuring that our approach remained non-extractive and inclusive of all participants that we interacted with. We were able to observe learning in action during conversations between programme leads and commissioners reflecting on our findings. This was particularly satisfying.

Your work and support in carrying out this evaluation and learning piece, and helping us think about ‘what next’ for this project, which we love, has been invaluable.

Sharon Dunn, Participation Lead, Camden Council