Communities Working Together: Year Two in Review

Two years in, and the picture is becoming clearer — both what’s working, and what’s genuinely hard.

Communities Working Together was established to do something ambitious: shift the balance of health and wellbeing back towards communities, by building the relationships, shared language, and collaborative approaches that help people across Argyll and Bute live well. That kind of work doesn’t happen quickly, and it doesn’t always show up in ways that are easy to measure. But year two has delivered real, tangible progress — alongside some honest learning about the conditions that make this kind of work possible, and the ones that make it harder.

What we’ve delivered

The Walking Development work has been one of the standout successes of the year. With a Walking Development Officer now in post, we’ve completed a comprehensive asset map of walking initiatives across Argyll and Bute — which will go live as an interactive resource on this website very soon. We’ve also been developing a walking prescription pilot in Campbeltown and Lochgilphead, working alongside Link Workers and GP practices to create group walking sessions that GPs can refer into. The response from GPs has been genuinely enthusiastic, which feels significant — embedding community-based, preventative approaches into clinical pathways has long been one of the harder connections to make, and it’s starting to take shape.

The Winter Seminar Series brought five international and national speakers to Argyll and Bute across autumn and winter, covering systems thinking, co-production, radical place leadership, community wealth building, and the broader path in public health. Recordings are available online. One of the things we’ve valued most is the connections the series has sparked — between people, organisations, and ideas — that continue to shape how partners are working long after each session ends.

In the participatory leadership space, the Community of Practice has become self-organising — people are arranging sessions, sharing resources, and supporting each other independently of the programme. Art of Harvesting training has been delivered to build capacity for documenting and evaluating participatory work. Resources are now available on the TSI website. We’ve also secured grant funding with the Public Health team to deliver a collaborative leadership project, which we’re currently designing with a place-based approach in mind.

What’s been difficult — and why it matters to be honest about it

The barriers to this work — partners under pressure retreating to operational delivery, capacity too stretched for the relationship-building that prevention requires, governance questions about who holds responsibility for what — are not unique to Argyll and Bute. They are the predictable consequences of trying to do systems-based, prevention-focused work within infrastructures designed for different purposes. Understanding that helps us respond more clearly, rather than treating every difficulty as something we should simply try harder to overcome.

At our most recent group meeting, partners reflected that despite everything, the foundations are genuinely being laid: GPs are engaging with community approaches in ways they haven’t before, the Community Planning Partnership and the Living Well strategy are increasingly aligned, and the conversations happening across organisations are moving in the same direction even when the pace is slower than we’d like.

The year ahead

Year three, the final year of the funded post, will focus on completing tangible deliverables, rigorously documenting what we’ve learned, and providing the Living Well Board with clear, evidence-based recommendations for the future — including how this work continues and is governed beyond April 2027.

Ensuring that happens by design rather than by accident requires honest planning — about who takes ownership, how the work is embedded in partner strategies, and what governance arrangements make sense for the long term. Those are conversations we’re actively having, with the right people involved.

If you’d like to find out more or get involved, you can read the full Annual Report here, or get in touch at [email protected].