Rewired Communities

Empowering local people to unlock a better future

A new blueprint for place-based transformation, co-created with communities, backed by data, and designed to last.

Communities across the UK are navigating complex challenges, from rising inequality and health disparities to environmental stress and diminishing trust in institutions.

Rewired Communities offers a tested model to respond to this complexity. By bringing together citizens, councils, funders, and businesses in structured collaboration, we help organisations and communities design solutions that reflect real local priorities and unlock long-term systemic value.

The programme is underpinned by our proprietary Behaviour Change Framework, co-developed with the University of Sussex. This model increases local agency, motivation, trust, and awareness, activating the social tipping points that drive sustainable change.

What Rewired Communities delivers

Deep community insight

Structured workshops and sentiment analysis provide a detailed understanding of what matters most to local people, from food access to clean air, housing conditions, and mental health.

Co-created solutions

Local residents, service providers, and institutions come together to design interventions that align with SDGs and funding priorities, supported by the Behaviour Change Framework to ensure engagement is inclusive, sustained and impactful.

Investable propositions

Outputs are not just ideas, they are ready-to-implement plans with business cases, governance models, and pathways to finance.

Scalable impact

From neighbourhood pilots to regional strategies, the model adapts to context while keeping citizen leadership at its core.

The Successful Pilot

Lambeth & Southwark, 2025

In partnership with Impact on Urban Health, Rewired Earth facilitated a community-led process in Brixton North. The result was a shared plan to regenerate local infrastructure and services through a commons-based ecosystem model.

Key outcomes included:

5 co-creation workshops with 45+ community members

26 industry experts contributing via a Solution Accelerator Group

109 residents engaged in SDG sentiment analysis

A detailed plan for a local Learning & Innovation Hub

The creation of the Brixton Commons governance model

How it works

A Blueprint for Local and National Renewal

1. Work with established local partners to do the deep engagement work with communities that builds trust and identifies local needs and priorities, recruiting a diverse group of community voices - residents with lived experience across the system.

2. Create a decentralised community network that makes its own decisions and has its own locally centred governance model.

3. Create an Innovation Hub with and within the community - a physical space or group of spaces that are owned by the Community, host programs for the community, and are governed by them.

3. Rewired Earth offers support through a portfolio of innovations, new technologies and new approaches, financed sustainably through (REEF) at a transformational scale and over a longer-term period than ordinary grant funding.

Why this matters for funders, councils and national institutions

For councils and local authorities:

Aligns with local development frameworks and public health goals
Builds lasting trust with communities
Improves delivery efficiency by reducing duplication

For funders and institutional investors:

Surfaces place-based propositions with clear social return metrics
Creates new pathways to impact investing at community scale
Aligns investment with real community priorities, reducing risk

For national government and policy leaders:

Demonstrates practical delivery of climate, health and inclusion agendas
Strengthens participatory democracy
Offers a repeatable model for other cities and regions