People & Place

Who we are

Footwork’s role as an architect-led charity is to provide support to people who have the ideas and the drive to help their local communities thrive. Along with funding, we give them practical help to overcome the barriers that stand in their way and to make useful connections in their community and with decision-makers.

We learn a great deal from the valuable local knowledge and experience of the people we work alongside and support. Individually their bold ideas demonstrate how resilient places are best created, while together they provide powerful evidence that - when properly supported - local innovation is very effective in changing places for the better.

What we’ve learnt so far

Over the years, Footwork has found that when ideas for change are locally-driven and informed by local knowledge and experience, they are much more successful. This is why we continue to support local social innovators. But at the moment the action they take to help their communities to thrive isn’t really known about or valued. So the challenge for Footwork and our collaborators is to make sure that their work is sufficiently recognised for the important part it plays in bringing about lasting positive change.

With the support of our Insights Group, we’ve learnt that local social innovators:

• can rarely afford to stop, take a breath and think strategically about their work
• find it hard to describe their unique offer and the impact of their work
• face all sorts of barriers that prevent them making progress with their initiatives.

The purpose of People and Place 2023 is a direct response to help to plug this gap.

What is People & Place 2023?

People & Place is Footwork’s name for an innovative programme of funding and support offered to local social innovators to turn their bold ideas into lasting, positive change in their communities.

Our grants give the time and the headspace to step back from the day-to-day delivery of their work, while our programme of support connects them with other innovators and a range of experts. It helps people to discover how to tell their story, to demonstrate their project’s impact, to identify and overcome challenges, to find useful collaborators and, crucially, to know their worth.

Read more about People & Place 2023.

What’s next? Why collaborate?

The next phase of our journey is intentionally focused on how we collaborate to identify, support and learn alongside our 2023/24 cohort of local social innovators, while also gathering the essential data - from the network as a whole - about what makes successful community placemaking.

Armed with this strong evidence, we aim to share it with local and national partners, so that together we can create fairer, more collaborative ways of working. To do so, Footwork is proactively seeking funding and thought partners who share in our vision for fairer, more equitable models for how places are transformed.