Place partnership: Oldham

Place Partner Mission  

Since 2018 Oldham have been part of Greater Manchester’s Place Partnership with Sport England to build healthier, happier, more active communities.

Key learnings so far (2019-24)

Over the last five years Oldham’s work has demonstrated the importance of working together, and working with communities, to tackle health inequalities and getting people more active more often.

Oldham’s key achievements can be grouped under:

• Community engagement
• Collaborative system working
• Local active partnerships.

Collaborative working

One of Oldham’s key learnings is the importance of collaborative working. This is supported by the co-designed place partnership principles which set out key ways of working in Greater Manchester. The application of these principles helped improve collaboration and communication across sectors and organisations. This change was first reflected in operational staff, however successes led to these principles being adopted at a senior level. One example of this is the establishment of the Moving More and Healthy Weight Alliance. This brought together new partners around common goals and shared challenges. This principles led approach is now seen in multiple programs such as Active Through Football, Play zones and a Social Prescribing & Active Travel pilot. To understand more about the approach and its impact please read the Active Through football case study or watch the videos.

Community engagement

Working with Action Together is a key to place partnership work in Oldham. An example of this collaboration is the Community investment Fund (CiF). This fund used a flexible and responsive approach to small grants in Failsworth and Glodwick - two areas with high levels of inequalities and inactivity.

The fund provided support for community groups throughout.  This included adapting application processes, and providing training opportunities to upskill community groups. Because of this approach relationships and trust with the local community were strengthened. This also helped the team build greater understanding of the local community and what support they found most valuable; Which in turn allowed the CiF to be adjusted to meet community need. This flexible way of working is now embedded in Action Together’ s One Oldham fund, and recognised as the standard way of CiFs delivery in the borough. Oldham work with their communities to develop their ideas and help bring them to life.

Glodwick active partnerships

Glodwick was one of Oldham’s first neighbourhoods of focus for the place partner work. The team started by working to build trust, relationships, and knowledge of the community.  One key learning from this was although there were lots of good community led work in the area, some of it was done in isolation.  To support greater connection the team established an active partnership called Develop Glodwick, bringing together well-established community organisations already doing some great work. This groups aim was to build greater connection between community organisations; While also uniting them around a common goal of reducing health inequity, physical inactivity and improving the lives of their communities. Develop Glodwick helped build a greater understanding of the strengths and need of the area. This knowledge helped the group identify opportunities for training, delivery, communications, and learning. This collaborative approach across organisations resulted in Develop Glodwick securing violence reduction unit funding.

GM Moving Podcast

Episode eight of the GM Moving podcast was released on September 2022 and looked at the place partners work in Oldham.

In the episode host Eve Holt talk to Claire Marshall about the Place Partner work in Glodwick. 

The full transcript of the podcast can be found here.

The Episode can be listened to below or found on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

Click here to find out about Oldham's place partnerships deepening plans