Identifying the building blocks of community cohesion

In our first post, we set out why philanthropy needs a system-aware approach. When This Day provided a grant to support our analysis of the social cohesion landscape in the UK, we built a natural language tool to identify who is operating in the field and how. This tool was designed to give a system-aware view of the cohesion landscape, identifying actors and patterns rather than isolated interventions.

By mapping the field in a system-aware way, we can see the local assets that already contribute to cohesion.

Neighbourhood renewal works best when it starts from what people already trust and use.

That was the argument of our recent blog Trust lives local: recognising neighbourhood impact economies. Across the UK, a rich civic landscape is already alive. Look closely and you’ll find a diverse mix community businesses, cultural groups, youth organisations, co‑ops, social lenders and community land trusts in neighbourhoods across the nations.

These organisations rarely describe their work as “building cohesive communities.” Yet through diverse, often separately funded activities, they lay the foundations for cohesion. They help people grow agency, open up economic opportunity, and create spaces where social connection can happen. This work is happening in far more places than we tend to notice.

Recent work we undertook with This Day to map the field of community cohesion suggests the potential for a much broader, more dynamic approach to learning and investment-one that starts from the strengths already embedded in local places.

Seeing the field: what did we do?

We set out to explore the cohesion landscape in England and Wales by building a practical, testable way of locating the building blocks of cohesion in place, using publicly available data.

Community cohesion is shaped by overlapping experiences. Strengthening it can be as much about helping people into decent jobs as about the spaces where they meet or the identities they share. Rather than fixing a single definition, we focused on identifying the building blocks that underpin cohesion. Drawing from existing frameworks and indices, we surfaced recurring themes and keywords to form a working understanding.

We applied a six‑domain framework (social capital; inclusion; participation; trust & safety; economic inclusion; democratic resilience) and tagged organisations and grants across Charity Commission, 360Giving, Co‑operatives UK and Better Society Capital datasets. To surface actors most embedded locally, we looked beyond charities to include co‑operatives, CICs, community benefit societies and community land trusts, revealing a diverse tapestry of community‑led activity across cohesion‑related themes.

We then zoomed in on organisations that appear to be growing and demonstrating impact, using proxy indicators-specifically, sustained growth in income, and volunteer or membership numbers. Our working hypothesis was that organisations demonstrating sustained growth in income and people power are more likely to be enabling impact and demonstrating that impact to others. We recognise scale doesn’t equal impact, but these signals helped us locate promising models for deeper inquiry.

Treating cohesion as an ecosystem, rather than a narrow social outcome, opens up a richer picture of where community strengths live.

What the mapping shows, and what it doesn’t

Two truths matter here.

First: a great deal remains invisible. As National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA) reminded us, much of what makes a place cohesive lives in the “microbiome”: informal groups, unconstituted networks, neighbour‑to‑neighbour activity that rarely shows up on a register. This kind of mapping is an entry point for listening to local knowledge, not a substitute for it.

Second: there is a great deal that is visible and strategic. This approach surfaces what available datasets can show: embedded, sometimes under‑recognised organisations that grow trust, widen opportunity, and enable agency. And they are far more widespread than we might assume.

Examples include:

• A community trust constructing a gathering space in Barrow Hill, including a community-owned pub, cafe and community pantry.
• A co‑operative lender in the West Midlands, channelling patient capital into small enterprises.
• A community‑owned pub in Long Parish, restoring a local social asset.
• A CIC based in Liverpool, helping community identity develop through creative land and building projects
• A Black and female‑led organisation in Greater Manchester, working to welcome and include people from global majority backgrounds

What this gives us is not a definitive map, but a different starting point.

It shows that the building blocks of cohesion already exist in many places, often outside the geographies or categories that attract the most attention.

Seeing these assets more clearly raises a practical question: what should funders and policymakers do differently if they take this picture seriously?

That question matters even more in the current policy moment.

Seeing these assets more clearly is only the first step; the next question is how philanthropy and policy can act on this insight—particularly in the current funding and policy landscape. Recognising these embedded strengths is only valuable if philanthropy and policy adapt to support and amplify them, rather than imposing top-down solutions.

Read the full blog series:

• Part 1: Seeing the bigger picture: Using a systems approach to guide philanthropy
• Part 3: Making community cohesion count