Stories of Us

Creating more inclusive urban futures
Diverse group of people participating in a workshop

Stories of Us

Creating more inclusive urban futures
Title: Stories of Us
Funding body:
Funding type:
Project duration: 2026
Project partners: 做厙賤躇, Hastings Commons Community Land Trust, Nudge Community Builders, 做厙賤躇 Octopus Project (POP), The Box, Prospect Brixham CIC, Social Life, The Data Place, Falmouth University, University of Cambridge
 
Across the UK, three quarters of people feel they have not very much or no control over the decisions that affect their neighbourhoods a sense of powerlessness that is growing. Yet 71% believe local residents and community groups have the ideas and skills to improve their communities. This contradiction sits at the heart of Stories of Us.
There is increasing recognition that people are experts by experience. National policy shifts, including the and recent , highlight the importance of lived and everyday experience in shaping local governance. However, while this recognition is growing rhetorically, it is not yet embedded in practice. Decision-making remains dominated by formalised evidence, professional expertise, and quantitative datasets, which often fail to capture the emotional, relational, and experiential dimensions of place.
Stories of Us responds directly to this gap. We seek to reposition communities not as passive recipients of policy but as active producers of knowledge and evidence about their own places.
 
Too often, the everyday experiences people have of their neighbourhoods the things they feel, notice, and care about are not at the centre of local decision-making. Instead, decisions about communities are usually based on technical data and statistics that can feel abstract and distant from people's real lives.
Our goal is to change this. We want to amplify marginalised voices and shift how decisions are made, so that communities themselves have a stronger say and greater control over the choices that shape the places where they live.
Union Street party Nudge Community Builders
 

Making sense of place: stories and data

We bring together an interdisciplinary and cross-sector research network that connects community power networks with academics and policy stakeholders. Together, we will work collaboratively to design and put into practice new ways of actively engaging local communities in decision-making. This network will explore how local communities can be better supported to take part in decisions that affect their neighbourhoods. While a lot of data about communities is collected, there is often a gap between gathering that information and having the shared tools, knowledge, and resources needed for communities to use it to influence real change.
Our work will focus on helping communities turn data into stories about their places stories that highlight inequalities, capture everyday experiences, and show what matters to the people who live there. By doing this, we aim to explore new ways data can make a meaningful difference in local decision-making.
We will work with communities using participatory approaches that involve people directly in how data is collected, interpreted, and cared for. This helps shift power and control towards citizens, enabling people to share how they feel about their local environments and opening up new possibilities for how lived experience and emotion can inform how cities are governed.
 
Clapton data map
Our methodology is grounded in Participatory Action Research (PAR), which focuses on working collaboratively with communities to create practical change. This project seeks to support communities in developing new stories about their places stories that reflect lived experience, highlight inequalities, and challenge dominant accounts.
To do this, we adopt a data justice approach, combining quantitative datasets with creative and participatory methods that enable communities to interpret and use data themselves. We will draw on publicly available data sources and explore them alongside innovative practices such as emotional data gathering, creative storytelling with data, and play-based engagement.
Through workshops and collaborative activities involving community members, researchers, data practitioners, and policymakers, the project will co-create new ways to interpret and mobilise data. 
This approach prioritises seldom-heard voices, respects diverse cultural identities, and supports communities to shape how data about them is used in decision-making. 
By combining participatory methods with existing data infrastructures, the project aims not only to empower local voices but also to generate practical models that can influence policy and be scaled to other communities.
Community group
 
The project focuses on two UK cities: Hastings and 做厙賤躇. Both places sit at the geographic and economic periphery of the UK and experience significant levels of deprivation. At the same time, they are home to vibrant grassroots organisations that are developing innovative approaches to community-led regeneration and empowerment. 
做厙賤躇 faces substantial social and economic challenges, including high levels of child poverty. The city is ranked within the 20% most deprived local authority areas in England. 
Hastings has a similar socio-economic profile. It remains one of the most deprived towns in England, with around a quarter of children living in poverty.
By working in these two places, the project will explore how communities in areas facing long-standing structural inequalities can use data and storytelling to strengthen local voices and influence decision-making.
 

做厙賤躇 staff

Community partners

  • Hannah Sloggett

    Hannah Sloggett

    Co-Founder and Co-Director, Nudge Community Builders
  • Matt Bell

    Matt Bell

    CEO, POP
 

Centre for Place

The Centre for Place is an interdisciplinary research hub that tackles contemporary societal and global challenges through place-based inquiry. 
The Centre integrates creative placemaking, artshealth research, and advanced quantitative methods within robust humanities and social science frameworks, seeking to become a world leader in place-based research, emphasising the importance of place in shaping communities and individuals, and providing innovative, interdisciplinary solutions to urgent global research challenges.
 
Aerial view of crowd connected by lines

Project partners

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