Southern Brooks is a community anchor charity building connections and providing support to help individuals and communities thrive in South Gloucestershire. We deliver high-quality community development and health and wellbeing services that support individuals and communities, helping people achieve what matters to them.
Our Strategic Aims:
- To deliver high quality community development and health and wellbeing services that support individuals and communities, helping people achieve what matters to them.
- To connect and strengthen partnerships and alliances in order that the VCSE sector thrives.
Our Outcomes:
- People in South Gloucestershire communities have a good sense of belonging
- The quality of relationships in our communities is high.
- People from diverse backgrounds trust one another and get on well.
- People actively come together to improve their community.
During 2021-22 Southern Brooks continued to feel the impact of the pandemic both internally with our teams and externally in the communities we serve, but despite that we continue to thrive as an organisation. Our people have been resilient, tenacious and creative, using their extensive skills, experience and expertise to provide empathetic support to people across South Gloucestershire. To look after them we have an employee support package that includes online counselling, access to workplace coaching and a developing wellbeing champion programme.
We worked hard throughout the year to integrate our offer, to deliver to high standards and to inform ourselves of the wider South Gloucestershire offer so we could support people to go to activities and access support when and where they need to. We have made some key decisions that build on our strengths, and this has led to what you see now: our ability to confidently articulate what we do well. Our new logo with our strapline helps us tell the story of Southern Brooks – from connection, through support to thriving people in thriving communities.
Our Health and Wellbeing teams have gone from strength to strength; we have maintained our One You South Gloucestershire Wellbeing offer so people are coached in making sustainable changes in their lives, and we've seen growth in social prescribing. The model is proving to be successful and we’re now adapting it to work with particular groups from physical activity to hospital discharge.
Our Sustainable Communities teams continue to work closely in Priority Neighbourhoods to support local communities build on their strengths. We have a fabulous diverse weekly growing group based at Orchard Medical Centre in Kingswood that illustrates what we do and why we do it. In response to world events, we started supporting Afghan families who have come to the UK through the resettlement scheme and more recently we have been working with Ukrainian guests to make sure they can access local community groups and networks.
As the voluntary and community sector lead locality partner for health and wellbeing Southern Brooks is a core member of the South Gloucestershire Locality Partnership and the Keep it Local group. Our commitment as an organisation to sector and cross-sector development in South Gloucestershire and across the Bristol, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire is strong. We believe in the power of partnerships, and we endeavour to live out our values.
For information about the role of community anchor organisations in reducing health inequalities
