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Community Wellbeing Index


COOP Community Wellbeing Index

  • Coop Wellbeing Index definition of community wellbeing:

“A collective feeling of leading a ‘good life’, shared and created by people and systems. Community wellbeing is more than people’s individual wellbeing, it’s the relationships between people and place.”

  • The COOP Index is a toolkit based on a summary of a number of key metrics that they believe reflect local views, thoughts, concerns, and feelings for a given area that are scored, put into a comparative scale then ranked for comparison to other areas across UK.

  • The COOP uses the toolkit themselves as an evidence base to inform their community strategy and to provide support through their Local Community Fund and for their Member Pioneers to shape their community plans to ensure key issues are prioritised.

  • to that end, the Index could help local groups, organisations and partnerships develop a further discussion as to what things are working well for different communities and what areas could potentially be improved

To find out more about the Index go to Home | Wellbeing Index (coop.co.uk) will link to local map and local postcode reports and/or the Community Wellbeing Index provides access to underpinning domains and metrics.

Put simply, community wellbeing is about communities experience and whether they are struggling or thriving. Wellbeing is personal and subjective, and this can make it difficult to share a common understanding of what exactly wellbeing is. As a result, measuring community wellbeing is not simple.

 

A range of research groups and organisations have developed community wellbeing measurement using approaches suited for different context and aims, at national and local levels. Well known examples include the ONS UK National Wellbeing Dashboard and the Thriving Places Index. Wirral Council has access to a range of wellbeing tools and measures that are used in context to provide evidence for planning and commissioning such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation, Local Insight reporting and additional health and wellbeing measures.

  • The COOP Index is a toolkit based on a summary of a number of key metrics that they believe reflect local views, thoughts, concerns, and feelings for a given area that are scored, put into a comparative scale then ranked for comparison to other areas across UK.

  • The COOP suggest that these data sources provide a sense of the social and material conditions for community wellbeing and an understanding of the different challenges and opportunities in each community.

  • The data sources measure things like the frequency of buses, access to adult education facilities and public green space in each community. These measures were put into a common scale to create a national percentile ranking, then they were combined to create a score for each of the nine main areas. These scores were then grouped together to give an overall Community Wellbeing Index score for each community. The UK average is also provided as context.