Work Package 1, led by Dr Meg Jensen, Kingston University, involved establishing a community of practice and using lived experience storytelling to understand our feelings around nature, culture and mental wellbeing.
The word ‘abundance’ in the name of our project, The Abundance Project, refers to a key tenet of our approach to tackling health inequalities: the recognition of abundance in every community — an abundance of skills, an abundance of expertise and an abundance of capable, driven people with a vision. Community is central to not only our approach but also the approach of the 11 other projects that have received the same funding from the UKRI-AHRC. Titled ‘Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities’, you can find out more about it here.
The Abundance Project is designed in collaboration with five Community Research Hubs. This means in each Work Package, over 40 people are contributing towards the data being collected. Composed of university researchers and Community Co-Investigators, and Community Voice Champions, this 40+ -person team makes up our ‘The Abundance Project Community’.
While establishing a community of practice is essential in a co-designed project, it is no easy feat. It takes time, consistency, generosity and trust. In The Abundance Project, we began this process in Work Package 1 under the guidance of Dr Meg Jensen, who brought her experience of delivering international humanitarian aid via community-building workshops to the project.
Meg began by inviting the core research team and Co-Investigators to a day-long workshop in June 2024. The purpose of this workshop was two-fold: (1) to identify shared values and concerns about the project and its aims, and (2) to work together to effectively recruit and train Community Voice Champions, as well as develop appropriate materials around consent in the project.
After this initial meeting, community Co-Investigators each used the collaboratively developed and adapted materials to recruit a group of Community Voice Champions, who would also become members of the research team.
Once the Community Voice Champions had joined the research team, they participated in a three-hour mental health awareness training session. This was kindly delivered by Louise Howard (Kingston University) and Dr Michelle Carter (Kingston University).
Following this, a total of 12 workshops, including a mixture of whole group and individual Community Research Hub workshops, took place between October and December 2024 both online and in-person. This involved academics, the community Co-Investigators and the 27 Community Voice Champions across the Hubs.
These collaborations created data in the form of:
· Workshop recordings and notes (transcribed and anonymised),
· Flipchart papers,
· Post-it notes with written notes and drawings,
· Notes on workshop stimuli/handouts.
Additionally, the workshops had creative elements, such as creative writing prompts and training for the Community Voice Champions to ask members of their community what their feelings around nature, culture and wellbeing were. These produced:
· 141 stories and a series of drawings collected by the Community Voice Champions from their communities,
· 13 letters by Community Voice Champions to their communities.
These materials were analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis, following Braun & Clarke’s 2006 and 2022 approach, to capture core ideas and meanings from the data we gathered together. This was done using a combination of inductive and deductive coding, and was carried out by the Project’s two research fellows, Dr Silke Zschomler and Francesca Taylor, who created a comprehensive coding framework. Additionally, Meg is looking at this data with a focus on understanding how effective, transformative communities of practice are created, as well as identifying, comparing and contrasting the challenges, opportunities, and relational and social nuances suggested by the data collected. Through this experience, the core research team will also work together to develop a storytelling toolkit that is adaptable for addressing concerns and goals in the future for community groups.
Once the final workshop was complete, Community Voice Champions were asked to share reflections of their experience being part of Work Package 1 through a survey. This survey was developed together by Professor Tushna Vandrevala and Dr Kerry Brown, with support from Richard Boulton, and is part of Work Package 6, which evaluates the successes and areas for improvement in each work package.
Once Work Package 1 was completed in December 2024, Dr Pete Garside began facilitating Work Package 2 between January and March 2025. This work package focused on what types of information about cultural and green community assets are available to the communities we are working with; to what extent these influence their behaviour in using assets and how; and what could be improved about these sources of information. We will publish a post about that shortly, which you will be able to find in our Project Updates page.
