Thriving Communities Strategy

This strategy has been written following our Thriving Communities City Conversations where we heard from hundreds of people – I’d like to start by thanking so many people for giving us their time and working with us to deliver our shared ambitions. Communities across the city are facing new and deepening hardships from the cost of living crisis. We have written this strategy to ensure fairness and to build on the sense of community and care that so many people have shown over recent years.

The Michael Marmot report, Build Back Fairer, shows the scale of the challenge we face and why we need a new approach. Soaring inflation and the cost of living crisis are making this even more important. As the UK emerges from the pandemic (and crashes into a cost of living crisis) it would be a tragic mistake to go back to the normality that existed before. It was marked, in England over the past decade, by a stagnation of health improvement that was the second worst in Europe, and by widening health inequalities. There is an urgent need to do things differently: to build a society based on the principles of social justice, racial justice, gender justice and climate justice; to reduce inequalities of income and wealth; to build a society that responds to the climate crisis while achieving greater health equity. In Oxford we are setting out how we will do this. We urgently need a government strategy that aims to build an economy centred on the achievement of health, wellbeing and sustainable futures, rather than narrow economic goals. Our aim is to help strengthen communities and focus our resources where they are most needed, in the face of huge funding cuts to local government since 2010.

We will adapt to local circumstances, at times connecting people, others times facilitating, signposting or commissioning. This way of working requires an approach where we build trust and seek to understand people’s lived experience, adapting our support to best meet individual needs. It also requires culture change inside the council and changing how we work.

We will increasingly work with community groups and partners, seeking out new relationships with people who want to make a difference. We will look for opportunities to build relationships with underrepresented groups and where the greatest inequalities exist. We know we can achieve better outcomes by involving more people and ensuring diversity in our teams. We also know that language really matters. We will ensure our language is easy to understand and inclusive. We have also produced an easy-read version of this strategy and made some accompanying short videos.

This way of working is aligned with our wider goals and aims, and our Council Strategy. Thriving Communities is one of the four interconnected areas of our Council Strategy, alongside our commitment to tackling climate change, building an inclusive economy and affordable housing. We have just completed a £13 million leisure centre decarbonisation programme making innovative improvements to Oxford’s leisure centres. We aim to support the delivery of our plan with Oxfordshire County Council’s wider strategic ambitions laid out in the Health and Wellbeing Strategy and Children and Young People’s Plan, and those of our colleagues working in Oxfordshire County Council Public Health.

I have created a short video, available on our website (below), to summarise why this work is so important and want to thank people for their incredible work across our inspirational, but unacceptably unequal city.

Councillor Shaista Aziz 
Cabinet Member for Inclusive Communities & Culture (May 2021 to May 2023)

Watch 'Thriving Communities Strategy Video 1: Introduction' on YouTube (3 minutes, 35 seconds)