Introduction
A short series on place and evidence
Place and Evidence is a new Substack for people who see ‘place’ as an agent of social change. Much social policy focuses on changing individuals, improving their health, or education, or income. Place based change works on everything around individuals, the social and physical infrastructure that connects, the relationships between people and the relationship between a community and public institutions.
The Substack seeks to answer a single question. What kind of evidence is needed for people who lead, fund, or participate in place-based change?
We are not seeking a neat answer to this question. Everything on this Substack is up for debate and discussion - we are keen to do our work in the open.
Alongside the challenges of engaging in ‘place’, we are mindful that we are seeking to answer this question as a revolution in data collection, analytics and dissemination is building steam. It will change how evidence is collected, used, owned and understood in the social sector.
The Substack is the product of four groups with different interests in answering the core question. John Hitchin and Anna Waldie from Stories of Change have deep personal experience in leading and evaluating place-based work. Michael Little from Ratio is exploring how place produces change, how does it make us well, smarter or happier? Jo Blundell, Lela Kogbara and Emily Sun at Place Matters are convening groups of practitioners with an interest in place. Finally, a wide range of place based practitioners are helping to shape the work through the network of Place Matters.
As soon as the work started -reading lots of papers on the subject- it became obvious that there isn’t a single type of place-based work. And that meant there wasn’t a single answer to the question of what evidence is needed.
Making progress meant identifying the main types of placed based work, and to do that we needed to pinpoint the factors that differentiated different types of work in the field. Doing that work led us to think differently about how the field is defined.
During June and July 2025, we will publish 30 or so pieces showing our workings. The primary function is to start conversations about how to do the work better, in other words how to use place as a mechanism for social change.
and contribute to the discussion..