Social Spaces Project

• Social spaces is a research project which aims to look at the development of high value community networks. High value in this context refers to both personal and community social capital with the intention of increasing:
• Wellbeing
• Social Cohesion
• Social Innovation
• Economic Recovery and Growth
• The primary aim of this project is to increase the capacity within networks for ordinary citizens to initiate and participate at local, national and international levels.
• In order for people to initiate and participate, individuals often require high levels of confidence, support, skills and a variety of imaginative ideas and tools.
• To create a resilient and useful combination of these important factors (support, skills, ideas, tools), this project intends specifically to find effective ways of injecting skills and support into communities through pilots in a variety of different types of networks.
• Existing models for deliberately developing social capital will be examined as well as creating new, culturally appropriate, models of use in the UK.
• The project has emerged from RSA Networks, a networks development project which started in November 2007. As part of this ongoing action research project Social Spaces will continue with learning about network development at a very granular level, while transplanting some these generic principles and models into new contexts.