We were pleased to see a number of articles this past month providing great arguments and evidence for what we’ve known for many years – that there is a direct link between stronger communities and health outcomes.

This Guardian article demonstrated how Frome is doing amazing work identifying and mitigating the link between social isolation and poor health by community building.

These kinds of articles and evidence are remarkable but unsurprising. Our work over the past 40 years has been predicated on our belief that reducing social isolation makes people healthier and happier. We hear this from the many volunteers and groups who use our volunteering service and from all the hundreds of groups we support, from the smallest neighbourhood associations to the largest Charities.

Public Health England’s latest research also underpins this. Setting out how strengthening communities, volunteer and peer roles, collaborations and partnerships and access to community resources all directly contribute to health and wellbeing.

We’re proud to be working hard to continuously review and develop the way we work with communities to create evidence based models that really work. We love hearing about the ways in which local groups are connecting people, reducing isolation and improving people’s health.

This year our AGM in October will shine a spotlight on this – look out for the date, coming soon!