BIG Lottery Fund Wellbeing Conference 2012

Date: Tuesday 4^th and Wednesday 5^th September 2012

Organised by: BIG Lottery Fund

Venue: BIG Lottery Offices, Newcastle

Post by: Lawrence Milner, Programme Officer

Last week Maggie and I attended BIG Lottery Fund’s annual Wellbeing conference in Newcastle. The Wellbeing conferences provide a great opportunity to learn from the other 16 national Wellbeing Portfolios and keep up to speed with policy developments and the current state of the Health agenda.   

Peter Wanless, Chief Executive of the BIG Lottery Fund opened the event explaining how the National Wellbeing Evaluation will be used to help influence policy, commissioners, and authorities including Public Health England. Peter was keen that the learning and messages from the Portfolio are shared as widely as possibly by all involved with the Wellbeing Programme.

The Centrefor Local Economic Strategies (CLES) went on to update us on the outcomes of the national evaluation which is based on a sample of 50 projects using questionnaires and 19 case studies. Projects with greatest impact tended to:

• Take holistic approaches looking at all aspects of wellbeing were more successful.
• Disseminated learning to secondary beneficiaries.
• Were community led.

Benefits of the Portfolio approach have also been identified including capacity building, sharing of learning, provision of datasets and the skills to embed evaluation within projects. Further details on the national evaluation can be found here.

Following an inspiring talk from the Altogether Better portfolio and two of their CommunityHealth Champions, we heard from the Social Investment Business Group about the increasing importance of needing to measure project’s social value for securing investment and the emerging field of social investment bonds. As traditional types of funding become this is certainly one to what for the future particularly as the BIG Society Bank develops.

On day two Geoff Wilkinson, BIG Lottery England Committee Member updated us on develops at BIG including the Fulfilling Lives Portfolio, Older People Programmes and BIG Local Programme along with their plans to explore social investment, in a distinctive yet complementary way to other providers.

David Robinson from Community Links called for a revolution in help us build a society that prevents problems from occurring rather than one that, as now, copes with the consequences. In times of financial austerity David advocated the shift in funding to preventative services to reduce the burden on acute provision. More details can be found at here.

A commissioning workshop identified experiences and common themes, including the need to take a flexible approach when working in different areas; to have concise information on impact, evaluation and benefit and the need to build personal relationships at varying levels within the Commissioning Authority.

Finally we heard from Roise Maguire from the New Economic Foundation on the ONS development of the national Wellbeing measures and NEF guide for measuring wellbeing which can be found at http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/measuring-well-being