Common Unity

Background to Common Unity We are a Health and Social Care organisation working in mental health and well-being with communities traditionally seen as ‘hard to reach.’ However, we don’t necessarily feel that communities are hard to reach, but we do believe that to engage with all communities we have to work smarter and in places where the communities are. Through this approach, we have developed excellent partnerships with a range of communities across Birmingham and wider and continue to work tirelessly to make a real difference at a grassroots level with communities. Having recognised the urgent need to provide health and wellbeing programmes that have communities at heart, we have delivered a wide range of social media and face to face wellbeing programmes which focus on upstream approaches to the health and social care landscape. By “upstream,” we mean programmes of work that helps people help themselves before life gets too difficult to cope with. We help individuals, communities and service providers overcome perceived barriers to communication and the fulfilment of potential, ensuring that services are both accessible and relevant. Our portfolio to date has included The Waiting Room, The Birmingham Barbershop Project, the Urbrum social media community platform, the Community Cohesion Programme, Suicide Prevention Training, Peer Support Programmes and the Connecting Community Networks Programme. How we work Common Unity believes that if you want to relate across communities, then you have to start to work more effectively with communities from where they are at. Since the start of us delivering innovative services in Birmingham, we have recognised that only through meaningful grassroots dialogue where the agenda is equally owned can the real issues for communities be recognised and prioritised accordingly. The top down approach of seeing challenges and difficulties being homogeneously relevant to all sectors of our community with the same solutions being