Community-led approaches to reducing poverty in neighbourhoods: A review of evidence and practice

Executive Summary

Overarching findings

  • There is no 'silver bullet' in terms of a single community-led approach that is best placed to tackle poverty. There are a wide range of community-led approaches and povertyrelated outcomes vary across and within approaches in terms of scale, nature and timing.
  • Some approaches impact on 'material' forms of poverty by reducing costs such as housing or fuel, providing access to low cost credit, or creating employment opportunities. Approaches can also impact on the 'non-material' aspects of the experience of poverty by enhancing health and well-being, improving quality of housing and condition of the physical environment, and increasing levels of social participation.
  • The timing and nature of poverty impacts varies by activity. Some have immediate financial benefits on 'pockets'; others improve the longer-term 'prospects' of households exiting poverty in the future; whilst some activities can 'prevent' households experiencing poverty in the first place. Community-led activities more commonly deliver poverty-related outcomes around 'pockets' and 'prospects' than 'prevention'.
  • Community-led activities achieve a range of valuable outcomes around poverty but sometimes only for relatively small numbers of people. However, it is important not to assess small-scale, neighbourhood-level activities only using quantitative yardsticks as they cannot be expected to tackle area-wide disadvantage in isolation. That said, more substantial, targeted and sustained investment for community-led activities in low income neighbourhoods could increase the scale of outcomes.
  • Appropriate levels of start-up funding and, in some cases, on-going subsidy may be necessary to sustain activities. Community enterprise cannot always become selffinancing, especially as there may be additional costs in serving low income communities.
  • The particular skills and leadership qualities of key individuals, as well as the existence of an active and supportive voluntary and community sector infrastructure, also emerge as important elements of success. One implication is that different approaches may have varying levels of transferability.
  • The evidence base is highly mixed and, perhaps unsurprisingly, less robust for smallerscale activities outside of formal government-funded programmes. There is a need for more rigorous research to identify the outcomes and impact of community-led activities on poverty. At the same time, it is important not to solely assess activities in instrumental terms around outcomes as the process of participation may be as important in many community-led interventions.
Publication Date: 
2016
Location: 
UK