Skip to content

The King's Fund and The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF) have joined forces to support genuine partnership-working in local areas between the voluntary and community sector, the NHS and local authorities to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities.

Watch our videos to find out more about the progress made by these partnerships. 

What is the Healthy Communities Together partnership?

Healthy Communities Together is built on three hypotheses. 

  • Outcomes for communities (especially reducing inequality) are better served by VCSE sector and statutory bodies working in equal partnership towards a shared agenda. 

  • Investment is required to support the participation of VCSE organisations as equal partners. 

  • Effective and sustainable partnership working is an active learning process that benefits from expert support to work differently through shared leadership of change. 

Following an initial phase, in which sites developed and agreed plans, Healthy Communities Together provides three years of support from 2022 to 2024. The National Lottery Community Fund provides investment to support partnership working. The King’s Fund provides ongoing input from its leadership and organisational development consultants and facilitates the identification and dissemination of learning. 

As the partnerships make progress, they are sharing their learning via The King’s Fund’s events, on the website and through publications.

Learning reports from Healthy Communities Together

Year one – 2022  

In 2022, we published a reflective learning framework. This is a practical tool with worksheets. It should be useful for any organisations developing partnerships and is particularly designed for those at early stages. It draws on: 

  • challenges the partnerships faced 

  • how they needed to change or refresh their approaches 

  • how they developed understanding of each other as partners 

  • what options they explored and what they found useful.  

Year two – 2023 

In November 2023, we published our observations on power imbalances in partnership working. This long read sets out the key ways in which power imbalances hare showing up in the five partnerships and how they are trying to address them. It also includes some reflective questions that partnerships across the health and care system can consider if they want to explore the role of power in their work. 

More information

For further information on this programme, please contact [email protected].