
Place Matters
Place Matters works in partnership with organisations and communities to create community-centred place-based change.
What we did:
- Big Change funded Place Matters in 2022.
- We are proud to have supported Place Matters to convene practitioners, funders and policy makers to advocate for ways to create better conditions for place-based work to thrive.
The Spark
The UK has some of the deepest and most persistent levels of geographic inequality in the developed world. Successive regeneration programmes by governments have failed to shift the underlying causes of those disparities.
Onward, the Centre Right think tank, looking at the performance of previous regeneration initiatives concluded:
“Looking at previous regeneration initiatives in this country and abroad, and find that the most successful schemes focused on smaller geographic areas such as neighbourhoods, invested in community capacity over the long-term, and helped communities take ownership of local assets.”
Decades of de-investment in local resources and support for community groups and charities has stripped away the ability of local people to be agents of change. Many communities no longer believe in the possibility of a better future.
There are no quick fixes for the complex and embedded barriers to change and every place has a set of unique circumstances. This is patient work and where change needs to be designed with communities and be right for the complexities of the local context. Place Matters believes that we need to embed a culture and practice of learning and responding to that learning as we design and deliver change. We need to help local people be local leaders, shifting power and responsibility progressively and investing in building the social fabric and infrastructure that enables people to act.
The impact
Place Matters was formed in 2019 as an informal collaborative of people and organisations who believed that the UK needed a core infrastructure for shared learning and practice development to enable community-centred, place-based change to thrive.
Incubated by another Big Change community member, Right to Succeed, the collective has come together with a shared commitment to use their experience and know-how to accelerate the practice and impact of change led by and with communities.
Place Matters supports practitioners and organisations looking to collaboratively bring about transformational change to their places, and create more favourable funding, commissioning, and policy environments for place-based working.
Big Change is proud to have supported Place Matters to convene practitioners, funders and policy makers to advocate for ways to create better conditions for place-based work to thrive. From funding roundtables and symposiums to place-based development events and workshops, Place Matters builds networks, shares insight and learnings to drive place-based transformation across the UK. Visit their website to see examples of their work in action.
In 2024, Place Matters applied to become an independent legal entity registered to further support and enable their work.
The Big Changemakers
Jo Blundell
Jo is co-founder and co-director of Place Matters. Jo has a background in the UK public sector and in designing and delivering transformation through collaboration and through engagement with people with lived experience and citizens. She has an MA in Service Design from the Royal College of Art and is a Design Associate with the Design Council. As a Fellow of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University she co-authored ‘Are we Rallying Together. Collaboration and public sector reform'.
ImpactEd stemmed from Owen’s personal frustrations in seeing amazing programmes often not sustained due to a lack of appropriate evidence around effectiveness, while at the same time, money and energy was frequently invested in provision that may well have been genuinely detrimental to young people’s life chances.
Emily Sun
Emily is co-founder and co-director of Place Matters. Emily has a background in working with organisations in the social, health, and education sectors, that are interested in building cultures, leadership and teams where collaboration, learning and innovation can flourish. She specialises in working with people and organisations that are focused on community centred, multi-stakeholder approaches to enabling places to regenerate and thrive.