Live Well is Greater Manchester’s movement for community-led health and wellbeing. It is led by residents and community groups and is supported by public services. Live Well has received more than £1 million over two years from The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest community funder in the UK.
The funding will support Live Well as it seeks to address the root causes of poor health and wellbeing in Greater Manchester. It aims to invest in people and communities to help them overcome challenges and build healthy lives and places.
Community-led health and wellbeing
Community-led health and wellbeing is the impact our thousands of voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise organisations have on our health and wellbeing.
Everyday, the information, activities and help they provide keep people connected and supported.
Health and wellbeing is community led when the opportunities in the places we live and the things we do are delivered with, for and by our communities.
What does it mean to Live Well in Greater Manchester?
Community reporters have shared their experiences of what it means to Live Well. They talked about what help they need from public services to make that easier to achieve.
You can watch the videos from community reporters at gmintegratedcare.org.uk/livewell
The barriers to Living Well
Too many people face barriers that make it harder to Live Well. Being short of money, what’s available where you live, your ethnicity or a disability for example.
The National Lottery Community Fund grant will help Greater Manchester’s public services tackle these health and wellbeing inequalities.
NHS, councils, voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise organisations will work together to unblock barriers and create the conditions where:
- Everyone has opportunities to be healthy, happy and connected through activities, support and information.
- Everyone can help make their communities healthier and happier, they are being heard and making a difference.
- All communities have the resources to make change happen.
This will mean shifting power and resources to the people and communities who are best placed to help Greater Manchester residents to Live Well. For example, residents in Little Hulton, Salford, have been coming together over the past few years to create new opportunities that improve everyone’s wellbeing. They have developed a bike park, started to build a community pavilion, and they made sure people had food and essentials during Covid.
Mark Fisher, Chief Executive, NHS Greater Manchester, said:
“We want Greater Manchester to be a place where everyone can live a good life, growing up, getting on and growing old in a greener, fairer more prosperous city region. This means us all coming together to improve our health and wellbeing. What happens in communities makes a massive contribution to this.
We are changing the way we work to support these community-led initiatives to flourish. The investment from The National Lottery Community Fund will help us to create the environment to support communities for the long-term.
By working together we can make a huge contribution to preventing ill health and tackling inequalities, creating fairer health for all.”
Further information
To find out more about Live Well, visit gmintegratedcare.org.uk/livewell
#GMLiveWell
