Thriving Communities Strategy

People

A more equitable and supportive society is needed, COVID and the cost of living crisis are further increasing inequalities.

What you told us in the City Conversations

For many people, this was the most important part of the strategy, being clear on how we will work and ensuring that we build on the learning from the pandemic – taking time to build trust and continue to work with communities.

You liked the clarity of our approach, articulated in the Thriving Communities Principles. You valued the space to talk and saw value in ‘joining things up’, and told us that the City Conversations provided a great opportunity to further your understanding, share your ideas and make new connections.

We had lots of conversations about barriers, you told us that a combination of cultural and social barriers make it hard to take part in leisure and cultural activities, including cost, lack of time, barriers to access, being ‘not for them’ and people’s lives being too chaotic.

You told us that a key part of accessibility was improving our communication and making places and spaces more welcoming. You also wanted one place where people could find out about what’s available.

“Ensure you are targeting a diverse range of members of the community, not just those with the ‘loudest’ voice – this can be facilitated through organisations on the ground who work closely with and are active within the community as a whole.”

City Conversations participant, 2022

What we will do

• Implement and encourage others to work with and adopt Oxford’s Thriving Communities Principles.
• Continue to develop our work in localities, making sure our teams are joined up and able to address the root cause of residents’ problems.
• Add our services to and help promote the County Council’s Live Well Oxfordshire website as a central resource for finding out what’s available to support people in the community.   
• Facilitate increased cross-sector collaboration for bids to the Community Impact Fund and help bring in more funding from local, regional and national funders.
• Hold an annual Thriving Communities Forum with partners to create an inclusive and diverse space to continue the City Conversations.
• Work with our partners such as the Department for Work and Pensions to create skills, employment and development opportunities.
• Work with the County Council, and other partners, to create a more integrated approach to supporting children and young people by building on the Ready by 21 Framework, collaborative bids to funds such as the Youth Investment Fund and continuing to collaborate on projects such as the Cultural Education Partnership Feeling Safe mental health project.
• Make better use of data so we can take an insight-led approach; embracing digital innovation, increasing digital connectivity, and supporting an open data philosophy.
• Work more closely with partners and the community to co-produce and promote activities such as You Move and Move Together.
• Ensure Oxford’s community services are sustainable and better connected, helping to deliver a range of local outcomes as well as outcomes for national strategies such as Arts Council England’s Let’s Create Strategy and Sport England’s Uniting the Movement.
• Facilitate preventative services to become part of a more integrated health and social care model, with increased social prescribing and GP referrals into a broader range of inclusive options.
• Adopt a whole system approach to enable fair and sustainable access to good food in line with the Oxfordshire Food Strategy.

Pride

We want everyone in Oxford to feel a sense of local pride and be free to be who they are and feel like they belong.

What you told us

You were concerned that inequalities are worsening and the harsh economic environment and budget cuts are negatively impacting the poorest people the most.

You were positive about the City Council’s work, you particularly valued the Council’s support over the pandemic when our teams were very visible in the community. You wanted the Council to be transparent and explicit with communities about what we are trying to achieve and you felt that this wasn’t always the case.

You felt some communities were very good with asking for and getting help, people and communities who are most in need often did not know what support was available to them.

You told us that our language and written communication were often hard to understand and that at times you wanted face-to-face contact.

Many people wanted to be more involved with local issues, some wanted guidance, funding or just to know who to speak to. Some conversations revealed  people needed more support to be able to be involved, or volunteer.

“It is much harder to understand on the phone - you end up saying ‘yes’ when you don’t understand.”

Refugee focus group member, 2022

What we will do

• We will use a variety of images and role models in our communications to inspire people and to be inclusive. We will continually challenge ourselves in how we use terms and language so that we can connect with our communities and residents in all our communication and interaction.   
• We will produce short videos and an easy-read version of this strategy to make it more accessible.
• We know the value of our workforce representing the community and being embedded within a wide range of local networks. This helps us to support Oxford’s diverse communities. We will continue to build on this through our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and People Strategies.
• We will continue to champion Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and engage with and facilitate conversations about equality throughout the city, and work to make Oxford an anti-racist city through our Anti-Racism Charter.
• We will work with Community Associations and groups such as Friends of Parks to help strengthen their governance to be more inclusive of the local areas they represent and better address diverse local needs.
• We will work in collaboration with refugees, asylum seekers and the migrant community to inform and develop a Local Authority City of Sanctuary Action Plan and ensure the City Council meets its commitment to become an accredited local authority of sanctuary.
• We will continue to promote and celebrate diversity, including publishing a calendar of diversity events and collecting and telling the unique stories and heritage of Oxford’s different communities in the newly renovated Museum of Oxford and online.
• We will enable arts, culture, sport, community activities and grants to provide and promote opportunities for everyone, and foster a sense of pride and belonging in Oxford’s leisure, cultural and community assets.
• We will increase the diversity of people engaged with Oxford’s twin cities and publicise the benefits of our International Links connections.
• We will audit our community spaces and places to make sure they are accessible to everyone.
• We will work to find a burial ground to meet the future needs of the city.

Place

The Council has a crucial role in creating community spaces that help people thrive, from parks and public spaces, through to community and leisure centres.

What you told us

You told us there are lots of great spaces and places across Oxford, but they are not all accessible. This was mainly university green spaces, and some community and leisure centres were seen as being unwelcoming to the wider community. You wanted community spaces and facilities to be better promoted. Several participants in the refugee focus group had never heard of community centres.

You were concerned about the increasing cost to access and maintain Oxford’s leisure and community centres. This would result in people not being able to afford access to them, with lower revenue resulting in deteriorating building conditions, among other negative consequences. You told us that you found it helpful when we combined services such as adding libraries and health services into community centres and felt this could help improve the customer experience and help save on running costs.

You wanted us to improve access to travel facilities, with healthy and safe travel options prioritised, and better linkages with green spaces and parks.

Our thoughts on how we can further improve this

• We will look to provide the best possible leisure service. We will do this through a series of dialogue with potential operators and compare what they offer with an in-house comparator. We will request innovative solutions that balance cost and social value, we will give options such as a longer-term lease and ask for innovative ideas about how the centres could be used to better deliver strategic outcomes.
• We will take a lead in reducing the city’s impact on climate change by working with our leisure partners, communities and Community Associations to implement further decarbonisation improvements, better cycling facilities and improve biodiversity.
• Explore with partners, such as Oxfordshire County Council public health and the NHS how Oxford’s leisure centres, especially those in areas of significant health inequalities can play a greater role in tackling health inequalities.
• Complete our investments in Bullingdon, East Oxford and Blackbird Leys Community Centres, creating fantastic facilities. The modular design of Bullingdon creates a blueprint for future developments.
• We will continue to seek out opportunities to join up our community facilities – to create sustainable spaces for communities. Our preferred approach remains that where possible we want communities to manage community assets.
• We have a map of all community facilities on our website, we will better promote what’s available, especially our inclusive activities such as free swimming for under 17s and produce an animated video to help bring this map to life.
• Ensure that our community facilities are well managed, inclusive and accessible with easy to navigate booking systems.
• We will use the International Society for Physical Activity and Health 'eight investments that work for physical activity' to guide our work to tackle inactivity. 
• We will review our parks and green spaces strategy in 2026 and explore the possibility of combining it with the next Thriving Communities Strategy.
• We will trial asking visitors to ‘pay what you can’ to visit the Museum of Oxford, generating income to help protect valuable services from the impact of government cuts.
• We will explore opportunities with partners to work with us to deliver services such as youth work, by changing the way some services are delivered and we may be able to access new sources of funding. 
• Embed healthy place shaping by integrating health prevention into neighbourhoods, helping to create more connected neighbourhoods with cycle and walking routes and providing affordable public transport, particularly focusing on areas with the greatest health inequalities.
• Ensure Oxford is a leader in Active Travel – working with Oxfordshire County Council and ensuring the voices of schools and other partners (such as Cyclox and Oxford Pedestrians Association) are comprehensively included in the delivery of cycling and walking improvements.
• We will work with partners to try and sustain and widen our inclusive community programmes. We will target those who are inactive and/or most in need. Partners and programmes include:
  • GO-Active
  • Move Together
  • You Move
  • health walks
  • Dancin’ Oxford
  • GO Active Families
  • GO Active Outdoors
• Expand the offer in Oxford Town Hall via its events spaces, the Museum of Oxford and café to attract a wider audience from the local community and beyond, with the aim to become one of the leading events and cultural venues in the city.

Progress

How we will know if we are achieving our objectives.

The ultimate outcomes we want to achieve are for everyone in Oxford to:

• Have a great customer experience when using Oxford’s places and spaces where they feel safe and enjoy themselves.
• Be able to positively contribute to society; feel connected, accepted and respected for who they are.
• Meet the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines for physical activity (especially children and young people).

The outcomes within the strategy are shared with partners, and where possible we have adopted shared measures, the measures also link directly into the Council’s key priorities and plans.

In keeping with our meaningful measurement principle we will:

• Use numbers so we are aware of how many people use our services.
• Use metrics to demonstrate value for money.
• Monitor progress against our Thriving Communities Action Plan and produce an annual update.
• Use techniques such as collecting and publishing the stories of our communities and their lived experience of Oxford, case studies and videos to bring outcomes to life and learn from them.

Annual measures of success

Our Communities

• Produce and annually review Locality Plans – these will be based on insight, with a focus on tackling inequalities.
• Increase the diversity of recipients of Oxford’s Community Impact Fund.
• Increase the diversity of volunteers and trustees – we will focus on our community champions programme, Community Associations, Friends of Parks and the Museum of Oxford.

Reducing inequalities

• Reduce the number of children leaving primary school who cannot swim 25 metres from four to two in ten over the lifetime of this strategy.
• Increase the number and diversity of young people taking part in Oxford’s Youth Ambition activities.
• Reduce physical inactively in the areas of the city where it is the highest.

Customer Excellence

• Increase satisfaction levels with leisure centres.
• Continually increase our score in our Customer Service Excellence accreditation.
• Achieve accreditation to National quality award schemes such as Quest (the UK quality award scheme Sport and Leisure).

Our Places

• Complete the redevelopment of Bullingdon, East Oxford and Blackbird Leys Community Centres.
• Contribute to the Council’s commitment towards pursuing zero carbon Oxford.