Our roots
Originally the Wellbeing Service in Birmingham City Council – where we helped shaped Local Authority policy – we became an independent organisation in 2017 to extend and develop innovative practice across the country. Through piloting different ways of tackling inequalities and improving wellbeing – including pioneering programmes such as Gym for Free, BeActive and Big Birmingham Bikes – we removed some of the financial barriers preventing people from being active. These formative programmes were characterised by the innovation, system thinking, and co-production that would come to define us.
The challenge
As a society we face many challenges: levels of poverty and inequality remain inexcusably high, trust in institutions is at an all-time low, communities are fragmented and very few citizens are involved in decision-making. In addition, climate breakdown presents the biggest challenge of the 21st century. There is significant work to do, and we all have a role to play in making the world better for those in the most need.
As Marmot and many others have rehearsed, thriving community needs all the right building blocks in place to live well: jobs, pay, housing, connections, healthcare, education and skills. These are the building blocks of life – the social determinants of health or the ‘non-medical’ factors that directly influence our health and wellbeing. Right now, too many of our communities have blocks that are missing or blocks that aren’t serving people adequately enough.
The needs on the ground in communities experiencing the most deprivation are acute, and we understand through our collaborative work, how to improve wellbeing to tackle these challenges. We know that doing to and not working with doesn’t serve those in the most need. The system needs to shift to move away from the methods that don’t bring about transformational change.
Our Pillars
Our role
Our vision is for a society where we work together to co-create a future free from inequality, where everyone can be happy, healthy, and active.
We have combined our work across place and within systems – across health, physical activity, wellbeing, active travel, training & development, food & growing, climate & sustainability – to create a model for planting, cultivating and nurturing community power in active citizens.
We are both a thinking and doing organisation, we simultaneously co-produce and lead best practice delivery, methodology and approaches working with communities, whilst positively disrupting systems to influence decision making and policy, and work to create sustainable system change from the ground up.
For the past eight years, TAWS has been developing best practice that leads to improved wellbeing in and with communities in need. Part of our early work back in Birmingham City Council – the free Be Active leisure scheme – has been cited by NHS Confederation as one of the top twenty interventions to support the prevention agenda and improve health and wellbeing amongst some of the most deprived households. We work with people and across systems to achieve change, and importantly transform the conditions where people live and work to fill in the building blocks that need replacing or are missing.
We aim to:
Where we work
We work with communities, organisations and partners across the country, involving everyone who has a stake in their communities and the finite planet we live on. We seek out and engage with local people and groups in neighbourhoods. We listen deeply, amplify the wide range of voices and co-produce innovative solutions which enable people to live well for longer.
We collaborate with practitioners, policymakers and partners from local and regional authorities, health organisations and the wider civic sector, to repair gaps in the system and generate meaningful change in communities.
Work with us
Training, leadership and systems change
We provide development opportunities to explore the fearless leadership and system knitting needed to build capacity, shift the status quo and reweave a social fabric damaged by inequalities.
Place-based work
Working with communities across the UK, we develop projects and insight in active travel, sharing and sustainability, youth work, health, community development and food to create the positive change we need now and lay the foundations for a fairer future.
