Blackpool Tower

In Blackpool, our team brings together organisations from the voluntary, community, and social enterprise sectors and colleagues from the local authority and NHS, creative and cultural sectors. Our team represents expertise by experience and by profession, including co-production experts, community and creative co-researchers and practitioners, and academics.

We are holding regular Discussion Forums to bring together partners and collaborators and help ensure the project is guided by the needs and views of local communities. The first of these was held in September 2024 (see our blog on the News page to find out more). Further forums are planned over the next 3 years, running alongside project activities, many of which are supported and co-led by people living and working at the heart of Blackpool’s community.

At our September Discussion Forum we launched a new community and creative health network for Blackpool and the northwest titled “Making Waves”  (please visit the Making Waves page for more information).

Find out more

If you are interested in joining the network or would like more information please contact ccch@liverpool.ac.uk

The foundations of our work in Blackpool

Our work in Blackpool builds on a prior phase of work funded by the AHRC’s Mobilising community assets to tackle health inequalities programme. The work started from, and is still strongly connected to, the Fylde Coast Research Collaborative. The collaborative unites a range of partner organisations from the VCFSE sector, local government, universities, and NHS with a shared vision of using impactful research to tackle health inequalities and improve the wellbeing of residents by placing people who live in Blackpool at the heart of everything they do. Through our initial Community Solutions for Health Equity project, we partnered with  collaborators with expertise in arts, heritage, health economics, mental health and public health. We aimed to deepen understanding of community resources and support available on the Fylde coast, as well as exploring how organisations work together. Through co-production, we worked to:

• Better integrate community-based support and assets in community hubs
• Create an action plan for place-based partnership to work across sectors
• Develop a future research agenda for coastal communities

We also ran seven research capacity building workshops – recordings of these are freely available: Boingboing Community Research Workshops

While most activities took place on the Fylde Coast, we also partnered with organisations in East Sussex, hosting a Knowledge Exchange event to mobilise community assets in coastal areas with shared characteristics. The report from our knowledge exchange event in 2023 is available here: Key discussion points of this event

Joint Blackpool & Hastings Knowledge Exchange Event