Coworking Builds Belonging
At first glance, Jelly South West might not look like part of Belong in Plymouth. It’s a coworking community for freelancers and small businesses. But dig a little deeper, and it’s clear: this is belo...
Journal
Building Neighbourhood Networks from Stonehouse
Stonehouse isn’t the only part of Plymouth that’s hungry for more connected neighbourhoods—but it’s been one of the most active. Through people’s assemblies, themed conversations, and informal gather...
Rethinking Community Meetings
We’ve all been to community meetings that felt like a box-ticking exercise. Long agendas, top-down updates, not much listening. So we’ve been experimenting with a different approach—one that’s less a...
Addressing Stonehouse Concerns: Dog Mess to Green Space
If you spend time in Stonehouse, you’ll hear the same things pop up in conversations: too much dog mess, not enough bins, neglected green spaces, and a sense that some parts of the neighbourhood get o...
Piloting a Trust-Based Neighborhood Model
When we started talking about a neighbourhood pilot in Stoke, we weren’t interested in setting up another ‘hub-and-spoke’ model. As Matt Bell put it: “We want to try a truly networked approach that e...
Strengthening Local Networks, Neighborhood by Neighborhood
We’ve always known that social isolation and loneliness are local issues. So we began thinking: what would it take to build neighbourhood networks that actually connect people? Karen Pilkington propo...
Building Everyday Belonging
The idea of a “care economy” keeps showing up in our conversations—not just as policy, but as practice. As Karen Pilkington put it, “If community groups aren’t funded properly, they can’t keep their ...
Rethinking Social Prescribing as an Ecosystem
In our conversations about social prescribing, something kept coming up: it’s not enough to send people to community groups if those groups are barely staying afloat. Karen Pilkington put it bluntly:...
Building a Collaborative City
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that collaboration in Plymouth doesn’t happen by accident—it’s something we grow, together. At a recent gathering, over 50 people from across sectors and comm...
Building a Functional Care Economy Through Social Prescribing
We’ve been revisiting social prescribing—because the cracks in the system are becoming too wide to ignore. In one conversation, Karen Pilkington got to the heart of it: “If there’s no community group...
Belonging Happens Neighborhood by Neighborhood
One of our biggest experiments so far has been our neighbourhood pilot in Stoke. It started with a simple question: what if we focused deeply on one local area? Karen Pilkington led the way: “I’m bot...
Beyond Referrals: Enhancing Social Prescribing
Social prescribing has been praised as a bridge between health services and community life. But what happens when the bridge has no foundation? Belong in Plymouth’s Core Team has been grappling with ...