BTH25-204 HUP Parkside Community Partner

What is HUP?

Born in Bradford’s Healthy Urban Places (HUP) is carrying out research to help understand what makes the places we live, work and socialise healthier places. HUP research is taking place in Bradford and Liverpool. In each city four areas have been chosen (8 in total) as centres for carrying out community-led research. In Bradford these 4 areas are:

1. Keighley Central (BD20, BD21, BD22)
2. Bolton Woods (BD2, BD18)
3. Barkerend and Bradford Moor (BD3)
4. Parkside (BD5)

This tender only relates to the Parkside area of Bradford

The focus of the research

The research is about what makes a healthy urban place. We want to design research questions with the community in order to answer the following overarching themes:

• What urban and environmental factors have an impact on wellbeing and which of these does the community prioritise?
• How do healthy places develop over time?
• How do different communities experience and benefit from different features of urban places over time?
• How can we measure and track changes in urban places that are important for health and wellbeing?

How will it work?

By bringing together community members who live in and are impacted by changes in urban areas, and those responsible for decisions about them, we want to produce relevant and impactful research that can reduce unfair and avoidable differences in health (health inequalities) and improve health and wellbeing long-term. In order to do this HUP wants to work with community organisations with expertise in engagement of often marginalised groups and an underlying ethos of working in partnership.

Together we will create a ‘Community Collaborative’ – a community-based research partnership – which will involve the HUP team, community organisations, and other stakeholders (such as residents, schools, places of faith, clubs, policy makers, council members and more). The Community Collaborative will work together to produce evidence on what makes a healthy urban place and explore how we can achieve healthier cities.

We will share the findings and learning from the research within communities in creative ways, and develop community-led reports for policy makers and government to influence future positive changes in urban areas.

What will a Community Collaborative involve?

The HUP team are looking for community organisations in each site to join us in partnership over the lifetime of the HUP programme until spring 2027. As a partnership, we’ll all bring something to the table:

• HUP will bring research skills, provide training for those in the local community (staff or service users), support local communities to get involved in and/or lead research, and help create opportunities for community members to meet with policy makers and implementors.
• Community organisations will bring local knowledge and lived experiences, skills in community & participatory engagement, introductions to community members, and access to physical assets, such as rooms and buildings.

Community organisations can apply to be a HUP partner to Bradford Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust. Funding will be provided for core costs (e.g. staff time, use of building and for carrying out specific research projects. Organisations within one area can apply alone or in partnership, and at more than one site if they have required links to the community.

What the research process will look like

At each site, the organisations involved in the Community Collaborative will jointly organise some 'inception' workshops with the HUP team. Together, we'll decide how we want our partnership to run (e.g. our ways of working, etc). We’ll start to explore factors that have impacted on wellbeing in the local urban area over time. Jointly we’ll prioritise what we want to explore first and will decide how we want to learn about it.

We might, for example, decide together to develop a series of fun, creative and engaging mini-projects in which community members can be trained as community researchers to find out about healthy urban places. The findings and learnings from these projects will be shared with our communities, the wider public and those involved in policy making locally, regionally and nationally. The allocation of funds for this will be jointly decided.

The Collaboratives will run for 2 years, with most of the work being conducted in 2025 and 2026, and finalising the process in 2027. Funding will reflect this, with the bulk of funding being provided in 2025 and 2026. However, during the process, we’d hope to be able to identify further opportunities and funding to work together on research in the future.

What is expected of a collaborative partner?

Community organisations will have a range of responsibilities that are noted in more detail in the procurement specification. Briefly, they will be co-partners in the Community Collaborative, and over the length of the funded period will:

• Contribute to the set up and development of the Community Collaborative
• Attend and assist in organising, facilitating and hosting meetings & workshops in the local area
• Connect the HUP team to community members and service users
• Co-design community-based research with the HUP team and wider stakeholders
• Co-design creative ways of engaging community members in finding out about healthy urban places
• Co-design engaging ways of sharing the learning and findings of research
• Distribute payments to community participants in the research – for example, any community researchers who get involved in finding out about healthy urban places
• Attend city-wide Collaborative meetings in Bradford and with partners in Liverpool