Meet the Community Teams
In January 2022, we asked a simple question: does anyone want to get paid to spend a year making a difference in their community with All In?
The answer was a resounding yes!
Nearly 200 local people applied to become Community Entrepreneurs. No CVs or qualifications were required – just a passion for the place they called home.
Following a unique recruitment process, a diverse group of 20 passionate local people came to the fore and formed four teams based in Braintree, Colchester, Halstead and Witham.
Starting in June 2022, they are dedicating a year of their life to one goal: creating a bold solution that tackles a major social issue devastating their community – and then making it happen.
Meet the teams in their short introductory our short videos below, then read on to discover what they will do over the next 12 months and what support you can give them.
Braintree
Colchester
Halstead
Witham
The Year Ahead
Insight: June – August
The teams will begin by taking a deep dive into their community. They will spend two months knocking on doors and meeting their neighbours to discover how local people are affected by their chosen social issue in their own words.
Their findings will be presented back to their community in a visual installation in the heart of their local areas.
Ideation: September
A short, sharp period of intensive brainstorming where the teams come up with innovative ideas to tackle their issue while crowdsourcing ideas from their community.
Experiment: October – December
Here, the teams go back into their community and carry out a series of small-scale experiments to test their ideas.
It gets tricky here: some of our favourite ideas might fail to work in the real world. However, throughout the phase, the ideas with real impact start emerging.
Making it happen: January – April
In the final phase of the programme, the big idea created by each of the teams will be launched and will be improving lives in their community.
But that isn’t the end of the road. Our teams will pitch for funding from Eastlight Community Homes and other organisations to sustain their ideas for years to come.
Next steps: February – May
Within a year our participants, few of whom have worked in social innovation before, will be fully fledged Community Entrepreneurs who are making a difference in their community and have a host of opportunities ahead of them.
Their journey will culminate at a major event where hundreds of people from the community, including the great and the good, will see for themselves how local people, coming together, have the power to do what others have failed – and solve the big issues affecting them.