Place Partners: Wigan

Overhead view of a group dance exercise class in a community centre

Place Partners is a Sport England funded programme that invests in a behaviour change approach in a place to enable sustainable change and gain valuable learnings that can be shared across the country.

From July 2018, Wigan utilised research and insight to create their initial 12-month plan, starting from April 2019; this can be viewed here.

Place Partners in Wigan has the following aims:

  1. Improving GP Patient Pathway by developing the community wealth building approach in a locality.
  2. Remodelling of the Youth Offer in the Borough
  3. Addressing inequalities in the Borough particularly those that have widened as a result of Covid-19 and can be solved fully/in-part through improving access to physical activity.

Further details please contact

In Wigan the place partners team have been testing ‘Roots to Wellbeing’, a programme that helps those furthest from the labour market to overcome significant barriers to progression.

It is designed to help improve an individual’s overall health and wellbeing, employability skills as well as their confidence and self-esteem.

This programme has tested a new approach by integrating more health, wellbeing and physical activity support within the programme to enable individuals to embed this within their everyday life, to ultimately add value to current employability outcomes by increasing confidence and self-esteem.

A physical activity coordinator provides one to one support to help sustain and maintain more than 30 minutes of physical activity each week, both as part of the programme and access outside of the programme into the community and through partnerships, such as Inspiring Healthy Lifestyles (IHL).

GM Moving Podcast

Wigan's place partners work was the focus of the third episode of Series 2 of The GM Moving Podcast, released on Thursday 25 August 2022. 

"For me it's the frustrations that Wigan was in a good place. We had the deal, we'd had all the networks, we had the steering group, everything was there."

Eve is joined at the Manchester Central Library by Chris Essex-Crosby, from Inspiring healthy lifestyles in Wigan, and Nicole McKeating-Jones, the GM Local Pilot Network Lead. Hear how everyone in Wigan is encouraged to play a role to design moving back into everyday life.

Full transcript for the episode can be found here.

Listen to the podcast below, or your usual podcast platform.