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Urban health

How we’re innovating to act on health inequalities

We back innovative projects to build health equity and help overcome barriers to good health.

Urban places, like where we work in the south London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark, have distinct health challenges – many starting early in life and influenced by the environments people grow up in.

In cities, the best health outcomes exist alongside the very worst. For example, in two adjoining neighbourhoods in Clapham, men in one area live in good health for an average of 12 years longer than those living a few streets away.

At Impact on Urban Health, we back innovative projects to build health equity and help overcome barriers to good health. One of the ways we do this is through the work of our innovation team.

How we innovate

Firstly, we identify gaps in our knowledge by listening to what our partners, colleagues and other funding organisations tell us about the environment they work in, and the obstacles they face in delivering impactful projects. We combine this with perspectives from communities in Lambeth and Southwark to inform what we investigate through our work.

We then try out new ways of working– exploring what works in our context and building partnerships across sectors.

Finally, we use what we’ve learnt to shape how our programmes work and share what we know with other funders and organisations working on health equity.

What we’re exploring

Over the next two years, we will focus on two broad themes:

1. How to be a better funder

We want to find ways to help build power in communities by bringing in the experiences, skills and knowledge of people from them into decisions that are being made about them.

One of the ways we’ve done this is through our work with The Social Innovation Partnership, where we piloted a participatory grant-making platform – called The Giving Lab – which gives power to make decisions to fund projects developed by community members to a panel of their peers.

2. Thinking about the future of urban health

We want to know what urban places will look like in the future – and how organisations like ours can prepare them to be healthier, more resilient places for their residents.

This includes rebuilding trust between the healthcare system and communities that experience the deepest health inequalities, supporting leaders to advocate for their neighbourhoods and find solutions to the problem of how wealth is distributed within communities.

Our vision

We want to see organisations like ours have as much impact as possible to improve the circumstances of people’s lives.

This means a sector that uses both learnt and lived experiences to make decisions, includes the voices of people from minoritised communities in its processes and rebuilds trust between institutions and the communities that they serve.

Get in touch with us to find out more about how we’re innovating to act on health inequalities.

Contact us

If you have any questions about our innovation work, email Claud Williams (Director of Innovation).

Contact Claud

More about our work

Our work

Cropped image of a wooden desk with a laptop, hands using a computer mouse. Photograph by Francis Augusto

Innovation

We test new ways to ensure our urban health programmes have the greatest possible positive impact on people’s health.

Our work

Our strategy

We collaborate with partners and share what we learn to build health equity for people in Lambeth and Southwark and beyond.