Thriving Communities Strategy

Oxford’s Thriving Communities Strategy brings together leisure, culture, and our work with communities to tackle inequalities. We will do this by encouraging well-designed neighbourhoods and parks where healthy lifestyles are the norm (sometimes called healthy place shaping), developing skills, ensuring growth is inclusive, strengthening communities and improving access.

The gap between the poorest and richest in our society continues to grow, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer – austerity, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis hurt those with the least the most. These inequalities are detailed in Oxfordshire’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment which provides information about the county’s population and the factors affecting health, wellbeing, and social care needs. Our ability to tackle inequalities is also being compromised by continued recruitment challenges in industries such as leisure and rising energy costs which are placing significant strain on service delivery.

Leisure, culture, and community services provide the most accessible, inclusive and cost-effective solutions for prevention and rehabilitation, and positively impact in many other ways, including health and wellbeing, educational attainment, employment, economic productivity, crime reduction, loneliness and engaging disadvantaged communities. This strategy is about connectivity and collaboration – ensuring we effectively join up our efforts to help create a more equal city. The strategy shows how things connect, where possible we have used shared outcomes such as our ambition that every child can learn to swim.

Our leisure centre contract expires in 2024, which provides an opportunity for these facilities to better meet changing community needs. We have been investing in our community facilities to ensure they provide modern, flexible spaces that are fit for purpose, carbon-friendly and long-term sustainable spaces. This investment includes developments at Rose Hill, Barton, Bullingdon and East Oxford Community Centres, with work planned at Blackbird Leys Community Centre; we have also invested in the Museum of Oxford. We want our community facilities to be accessible and well-governed with a diverse and representative group of trustees, staff and volunteers. 

To make sure we don’t lose the learning from the pandemic, we have implemented new locality structures with teams from across the Council working more collaboratively with Oxford’s communities. Increasingly, we will align our work with partners, generating shared insights and co-creating better services for residents. We have developed our Thriving Communities Principles, and while these are not set in stone, they show how we will work with communities, collaborating, and building on what’s strong.