Redefining social value by understanding community priorities

Social value is a minefield. Organisations across the industry are claiming the positive impact of their work amongst local communities, yet much of the discourse around social value is vague and misleading.

One of the challenges we face in defining, and ultimately in evidencing social value, is that communities are diverse and priorities vary from place to place – priorities which are dependent on social, economic and cultural contexts and histories.

Social value is not one size fits all. What’s important for one community to thrive will not be the same for another. So, how can we ensure that strategy and delivery genuinely responds to the real wants and needs of a community?

When I talk with people who are living and working among new developments about what is valuable to them, their responses are markedly different to common messaging on social value. Instead of pointing to metrics such as the number of apprenticeships or volunteering hours logged, what they often value is more relational, such as a sense of trusting their neighbours or feeling hopeful for their children’s futures.

The more easily quantifiable route often adopted risks losing what is genuinely meaningful to people. Despite good intentions, we risk perpetuating a top-down approach to social value that is disconnected from reality. This shows the inconsistencies between government drives for social value, and the realities of communities’ lived experiences.

At Stride Treglown, we’re integrating a new approach by working with communities to understand local priorities while also working within distinct legislative frameworks. Over the past year, we have been working on a new primary school for Glyn-coch, a town outside Pontypridd, Wales. The brief, part of the Welsh Government’s Sustainable Schools Challenge, asked for an “educational, community and wellbeing hub”.

In order to design a wellbeing hub, we started with defining wellbeing within the local context. So, we spoke with parents, teachers, grandparents, former pupils and youth engagement workers, beginning with the question, “what does wellbeing mean to you?” We then invited a discussion about the national indicators outlined in the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (WFGA) – which specifically outlines social, cultural, economic and environmental wellbeing. We explored how people experienced these on a local level, and the interconnections between different indicators from the WFGA.

From these transcripts, we drew out reflections on indicator themes, alongside insights which arose independently throughout conversation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, community reflections about what they valued did not align to the governmental framework. Instead, insights about what was truly valuable in people’s lives focussed on specific interpersonal experiences such as enhanced social cohesion – which they believed might be created through the provision of social infrastructure such as playing fields, alleviating teenage boredom and vandalism.

The tough part comes in looking beyond Glyn-coch. What methodologies can the industry use to begin to map local experiences of wellbeing? And how can practitioners respond to this data in a meaningful way to ensure the design and development process truly creates value with local communities?

Through our work with the people of Glyn-coch, we’ve begun to answer these questions by coding qualitative interview data to translate it into a format which can be analysed, suggesting clear design implications to respond to local people’s understanding of wellbeing. In Glyn-coch, that meant explicitly focusing on service provision, safety and security, and community relationships as the key anchors of local wellbeing and social value. Whilst by no means the answer, we hope that this work is a step in the right direction, helping us to focus on the things which really matter and act accordingly.