Building Community Capacity: Economic Case Studies
The National Development Team for Inclusion with support from TLAP have produced a review of economic evaluations and studies conducted on seven approaches to building community capacity:
- Community Development
- Community Navigators
- Local Area Co-ordination
- Peer Support
- Shared Lives
- Social Prescribing
- Timebanking
The value of building community capacity to social care is now widely recognised. Despite this acceptance, and a growing body of work to support development, its spread is uneven with pockets of promising practice rather than large-scale change. One of the reasons for this is that it can be difficult to make the case for investment when many of the approaches to building community capacity do not lend themselves to traditional commissioning and service development.
For each of seven approaches, a short scoping review of research, including a form of economic evaluation, was conducted.
A systematic approach was adopted using key search terms. Both peer reviewed publications and grey literature were included, from 2010 onwards and confined to UK studies where possible.