What are community insights?
Community insights include quantitative and qualitative information that paints a picture of our different communities and represents their specific strengths, health needs, enablers and barriers to living fairer, healthier lives. You can find examples of community insights on this page of the data observatory.
Local level insights are crucial for understanding our unique communities in Greenwich. Locally and nationally collected insights can be particularly helpful for improving our understanding of smaller or underreported populations. Inclusion health groups experience extreme health inequalities and can be underreported in datasets. You can find out more about inclusion health on this page of the data observatory.
How can we collect and apply community insights?
Community insights are often collected through community engagement activities including surveys, workshops, focus groups and interviews. Community listening, peer research and community reporting can be powerful techniques for collecting rich insights and empowering communities. The Our Greenwich: Community Engagement Pledge has been developed and designed to help the Council, colleagues and partners to deliver on the best practices relating to community engagement. The way in which insights are collected and categorised is important. Well Newham’s Health Equity Toolkit includes the ART (Accessible, Relevant, Trusted) framework, which can be used for categorising insights.
It is often the case that we focus on community needs and start with the barriers and challenges facing communities. However, our diverse communities have a range of strengths and assets that we recognise. You can search for local activities, groups and services on the Greenwich Community Directory. Further information on community resources such as community assets and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in Greenwich can be found in the Royal Greenwich Community Resource Strategy.