What is Live Well?
Live Well is Greater Manchester’s movement for community-led health and wellbeing. It's part of Andy Burnham’s Manifesto commitment for “everyone in every community to have daily access to support and advice to improve their physical and mental health and socio-economic status”.
Being able to Live Well can mean different things to different people:
- Enjoying life
- Having purpose
- A good job
- Being in a warm and safe house
- People to spend time with and care about
- Being represented
- Having a voice and a say in decisions about my life
The neighbourhoods we live in and the communities we are a part of, help us live a healthy, happy life. They help us feel supported, connected and resilient through a variety of information, activities, and networks.
In Tameside, there are numerous organisations within the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector focused around supporting people’s health and wellbeing. These groups make a huge contribution to keeping residents healthy and well.
Tameside is one of the ‘Accelerator sites’ for the Live Well programme, and Action Together are working with the Innovation Unit and GMCA to to shift thinking in Tameside around the needs and recognition of community-led wellbeing and prevention.
Through Live Well, we want to:
- Showcase what is available across communities in Tameside to support prevention
- Facilitate conversations through the system on where we can work together
- Support the development of a Prevention Framework for this activity and encourage more investment in Tameside
In Tameside, we are using the power of stories to connect and create change
In September 2024, we held a storytelling workshop with leaders from VCFSE organisations to share stories about how the community keeps people healthy and well in Tameside.
We invited colleagues from Population Health to listen to powerful impact stories from The Anthony Seddon Fund, Prime Active Communities, New Life Church, West African Development and how their work is changing the lives of local people.
Through these stories, we heard the positive outcomes for local people as result of feeling supported, with the trust and relationships that are built over the long term. Here is what we heard:
Stories have the power to connect and create change, and we want to capture and showcase many more of these stories. We will be using a range of different storytelling techniques and methodologies to have the biggest impact. Through these stories we will continue to gather outcomes which showcase the role the VCFSE sector plays as a key partner in prevention.
live well quotes 2 by Action Together
Get involved
Having a voice and a say in decisions is part of living well.
At our Voluntary Sector Summit in April 2025, we invited VCFSE sector organisation to be part of the Live Well journey, and work with us to co-design Community-led Wellbeing principles. These principles describe the behaviours, values and hopes of the VCFSE sector, and our contribution to keeping residents healthy and well in Tameside.
Attendees discussed and developed these principles, and built their own storytelling skills with a practical workshop and take-away toolkit from The Saltways. All Action Together member organisations can access the storytelling toolkit from the Member Resources area when they log in to their account.
Find out more about the event, and watch this video to see more highlights from the day.
Do you have a story to tell about the way your organisation's work has improved the life of a local person or your community?
We want to know:
- What was going on for this person?
- How did you first connect?
- What support did they get in their community?
- What impact did that support have?
- What changed for this person?
You can send us your stories and find out how to get involved by emailing development@actiontogether.org.uk