Three Oldham community projects awarded £435,000 to help improve local wellbeing

Three community projects based in the Oldham area have been awarded a total of £435,000 from the British Science Association’s The Ideas Fund.

The money will help to continue and extend the projects' work improving the mental wellbeing of their local community, alongside researchers who are helping them turn their ideas into reality.    

The projects awarded are: an organisation supporting women with mental health challenges; an arts organisation working with women who have experienced domestic violence to collaboratively produce creative, supportive, resources; and a charity working with Black and refugee women to ensure their experiences and voices are heard in research.  

Launched in January 2021, The Ideas Fund is a grants programme, delivered by the British Science Association with support from Wellcome.

It aims to connect community groups with researchers to explore ideas related to improving mental wellbeing and diversifying the voices within health research.    

The Fund supports projects that involve communities in four regions of the UK - Oldham, North West Northern Ireland, Hull and the Scottish Highlands and Islands.  

To date, The Ideas Fund has supported more than 70 projects, totalling around £7 million, with a focus on addressing the systemic challenges that community groups and researchers can face in working together.    

The phase of grant funding now announced will cover the next three years.

The Ideas Fund team will work with all the funded projects to gather feedback into how community group and researcher partnerships work and provide examples of the impact and what becomes possible when these collaborations are supported.   

The projects that received funding from the Oldham area are listed below:   

SAWN (Support and Action for Womens Network): is a charity that works predominantly, but not exclusively with, Black African migrant women in Oldham.

With support from their researcher, Dr Suryia Nayak from Salford University, they have explored what research is and how they can create their own research.

They have also developed creative ways of self-expression, such as the ‘Sisters of the YAM Choir’ giving the women of SAWN an opportunity to realise and raise a collective voice against systems of oppression.

The collaboration with their researcher has enabled the women to build their skills, confidence and connections.

Two SAWN women contribute to a Greater Manchester gender-based violence panel.

The choir has performed at many events in the community, including the NHS Social Care Futures Event.

Their evidence building grant proposal has two parallel focuses.

The first is on both finding ways to describe and share their intersectionality-focused approach to community research to influence the research system which they have experienced as extractive, colonial and problematic.

The second is finding ways for the knowledge surfaced through this method to have policy and practice impact.

The type and focus of this impact will be emergent, and determined by the women involved, but some examples they have in mind include changing policy around the NHS surcharge for migrant women and contributing to shaping the city region’s Live Well wellbeing strategy.

The use of creative methods for sharing their insight and recommendations will underpin both strands.

Inspiring Futures Partnership CIC: is the foundation of Inspire Women Oldham and StrongHer Together.

They are passionate about empowering women with mental health challenges.

Their mission is to amplify voices, open doors to previously inaccessible spaces, and support women in leading fulfilling lives. In doing so, they inspire others to do the same.

For several years, they have collaborated with researchers from the University of Manchester and the University of Huddersfield to develop, test, and share innovative research methodologies.

These efforts focus on empowering women to take active roles in co-creating, leading and shaping research, often through creative activities that explore new ways to pose and answer questions about the world.

In their Evidence Building Grant, they want to spend more time sharing the methods they have been trying out with a wider audience, alongside growing communities of like-minded people.

The ambition is for a transformative shift in research practice – for them, this is as much about changing the system as sharing their work. 

They aim for community-driven research to become the norm, and for people to value a much broader spectrum of voices, methods and approaches in the way research is carried out.   

Made by Mortals: a participatory arts organisation working with communities to understand their lived experiences and transform them into creative resources to change practice, policy, and create better understanding.

Through their initial grant, Made by Mortals worked with Asian women to explore experiences of domestic abuse, creating a widely-watched film on coercive control and developed training for safeguarding and frontline professionals.

With their new grant they propose bringing together their significant pool of existing resources, using them to amplify their impact locally through the strengthening of existing relationships and interactive workshops. 

Chris Manion, Head of Grants at the British Science Association, said: “We’re so proud of how the Fund has grown and arem excited to see how these incredible projects can have an even greater impact.

"With communities taking the lead, The Ideas Fund is demonstrating a new approach to partnering with researchers, and we’re seeing already how this can help make real improvements to people’s wellbeing.

"We’re excited to learn more from supporting these projects over the next three years, along with a number of others across the UK.”  

For more information about The Ideas Fund, visit: theideasfund.org or follow @TheIdeasFund on X or @TheIdeasFund on Facebook.

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