SOCIAL INNOVATION
Practical change, led by communities.
What We Mean By Social Innovation
Social innovation, for us, is about people responding to real problems with practical solutions rooted in lived experience, necessity, and care.
The most powerful innovations often already exist. They live in informal support networks, community knowledge, and the everyday ways people help each other survive and thrive. They are simply under-resourced, unseen, or overlooked.
Our work is about recognising that innovation is already happening in communities and backing it to grow, influence, and last.
Where It Comes From
The people most affected by broken systems are usually the first to find ways around them. They understand where services fail, what makes access impossible, and what dignity looks like in practice.
Social innovation starts with listening to what communities have already figured out. Our role is to help those ideas reach decision-makers, funding, and systems without losing their purpose along the way.
Our Approach
We support innovation that is community-led, practical, and designed to change systems rather than manage around them.
That means starting with communities’ priorities, working alongside them to test and strengthen ideas, and helping those innovations influence policy, commissioning, and service design. We help build the conditions for the right solutions to grow — and stay.
From Ideas To Action
Social innovation only matters if it changes people’s day-to-day lives. Our work focuses on turning lived experience into action, supporting communities to lead delivery, and embedding change into systems so it lasts beyond any single programme or funding cycle.
What Success Looks Like
We measure success by whether people’s lives improve. Whether barriers are removed. Whether communities gain power and confidence. Whether change continues after our involvement ends. If a community no longer needs us, that is success.
Social Innovation In Practice – Our Work
Taking advice into healthcare We embedded social welfare advisers into GP surgeries, giving patients immediate access to help with housing, debt, and benefits at the moment those pressures were affecting their health. Practical advice, delivered where people already seek help, changes outcomes in ways clinical intervention alone cannot.
Reaching people other services don’t We developed specialist legal advice for people detained in secure mental health units — helping them understand their rights and access representation at the point when they had the least power to advocate for themselves.
Starting early, staying close We delivered advice and support for parents of young children through early years settings families already trusted — reaching people before problems became entrenched, and demonstrating how community-rooted support prevents long-term disadvantage.
What Is Social Innovation?
Social innovation is the development of new ideas, approaches, and models that meet social needs more effectively than existing solutions. It sits at the intersection of social purpose and practical action — drawing on evidence, lived experience, and community knowledge to create change that lasts.
Unlike traditional service delivery, social innovation challenges the conditions that create problems in the first place. It might mean redesigning how a service is delivered, building new partnerships across sectors, shifting power to communities, or finding entirely new ways to address entrenched inequality.
The goal is not just to help people manage difficult circumstances — it is to change the systems and structures that make those circumstances so common.
Our Track Record
We have been supporting community-led social innovation since 2011.
Over 40,000 people supported across England. Long-term programmes responding to poverty, housing insecurity, health inequality, and access to advice. Delivery alongside the NHS, local authorities, and voluntary organisations. Innovations that continue beyond initial funding.
Innovation as practice, not as idea.
Working With Us
For commissioners and funders If you want social innovation that is grounded, accountable, and community-led, we can support you to do that well.
For delivery partners We work in partnership to embed social innovation across programmes — built in from the start, not bolted on at the end.
For communities If you are already doing things differently and want support to grow, strengthen, or sustain what you have built, we will work alongside you.