Big Local is a long-term resident-led programme established in 2010 which provides resources and support to 150 communities across England. It is supported by Local Trust and operates with an underpinning ethos expressed in the hypothesis that “long term funding and support to build capacity gives residents in hyper local areas agency to take decisions and to act to create positive and lasting change”. This highlights the significance of agency in generating change.

‘Our Bigger Story’ is the longitudinal multi-media evaluation that runs alongside Big Local, charting the stories of change in 15 different Big Local areas, covering urban, rural and seaside communities. Based on evaluation research between 2017 and 2019 , this report explores Big Local as a catalytic ‘change agent’, looking at the nature of change, and the differences Big Local is making in these areas.

There are three main messages from this wave of the evaluation:

• Change associated with Big Local is multi-faceted. It can be seen in lots of different ways for individuals, local groups and across communities as a whole. It can involve, for example, reducing social isolation, boosting confidence and aspirations, building new skills and employment opportunities, developing community groups, voluntary organisations and new ventures, opening community hubs and spaces, improving the physical environment, and helping to generate a greater sense of community spirit and cohesion. Big Local also involves important convening and coordinating powers, although the impact on higher level strategic developments is less developed at this stage in the programme.
• Big Local mobilises a range of actors, resources and approaches to create change. It brings together residents as both active partnership members and volunteers, specialist paid workers, support from expert Reps and Locally Trusted Organisations (LTOs), and other agencies created or engaged to coordinate and deliver activities. Change is generated through a combination of Big Local funding and other leveraged resources, capacity building at local and national levels, but crucially through local knowledge and commitment – a passion about place.
• Resident-led change faces significant challenges and dilemmas. These can be “internal” in terms of personalities, power struggles and the inaccessible ways in which partnerships sometimes operate. But crucially they also relate to ‘external’ forces and wider policy change. There is limited understanding of, and scope for, influencing key strategic decision-makers and other pressures which affect the community. Influence is stronger within Big Local areas rather than on those that lie beyond them.

There are four phases of evaluation; the first phase covered 2015-2016, the second phase 2017-2019. There will be two more phases, 2020-2022 and 2023 – 2025.

The Big Local model provides significant resources for resident-led action, but also combines a patient time-scale, additional support, an institutional structure of partnerships and Locally Trusted Organisations, and a hyper-local community approach. The report concludes that the support and resources available to Big Local areas are just a starting point, for bringing about resident-led change.