Arts in the Age of Data: Community Prosperity in England
‘Community Prosperity in England’ - Infographic made by liberal arts students in December 2022 for Arts in the Age of Data module - published on Aurora as an example for this year’s cohort.
Note from the makers:
Not long before our team approached the Arts in the Age of Data Infographic assignment, the government had introduced the Levelling Up Fund. This is a fund aimed at supplying grants to communities across the UK to support local organisations which serve community needs. By the time we had started our research, the Levelling Up Fund had begun to allocate its first wave of funding. This allocation of funding had been informed by the governments ‘Priority Index’ which ranked local authorities within three levels of need. Both the ranking system and the extent to which the allocated grants reflected this ranking system appeared dubious to sceptics.
We thought it would be interesting to compare the Levelling Up Fund to a pre-existing fund which served a similar purpose, The National Lottery Community Fund. We found that the distribution of funding across regional areas differed between the two funds. Given the differences, we soon became interested in how community wellbeing could be measured, what this meant and what its challenges were. We found that ‘community wellbeing’, while a growing concept, was not a standardised idea and was difficult to measure. Nonetheless, we used preexisting opinion polls to investigate the relationship between ‘community wellbeing’ and funding on a national level.
After our initial research we decided it would be useful to look on a local level at Bristol given the challenges and complexities of measuring community wellbeing alongside funding. Our initial research had shown us that there were many different approaches to quantifying community wellbeing – For example, some approaches measure community wellbeing using opinion polls on attitudes to the respondent’s local area, while some focus on how able a resident is to access community services. Focusing locally on Bristol allowed us to approach the relationship between funding and community wellbeing with more depth.
