Enjoying life;
Live Well
Being able to Live Well means different things to different people.
For some, it’s having a voice in decisions about their own life. For others, it’s about purpose, a decent job, a warm home, supportive relationships, or simply having enough money to get by.
The Live Well movement is about ensuring everyone in Greater Manchester has the chance to be healthy, happy and socially connected. It’s a vision where communities have the resources, information and support they need to drive change and shape community-led health and wellbeing.
The VCSE sector is central to this. Local voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations are rooted in communities, trusted by the people they serve, and play a crucial role in breaking down barriers to Living Well — whether those barriers are financial, social, cultural, or linked to disability, housing or access to opportunities.
We’re working with VCSE and public sector colleagues to shape and codesign Live Well, and lobbying to ensure communities have the resources they need to scale up to provide this support. We are also working with colleagues across the region to secure long-term resources, ensuring our sector is resilient and sustainable.
What is Live Well?
“Where you have good health, that’s the greatest wealth you can have”
– Folashade Alonge, Founder. De Butterfly CIC.
The neighbourhoods we live in and the communities we are a part of help us live a healthy, happy life. They help us feel supported, connected and resilient through a variety of information, activities, and networks.
Being able to Live Well can mean different things to different people:
having purpose;
a good job;
being in a warm and safe house;
people to spend time with and care about;
being represented;
having a voice and a say in decisions about my life.
10GM’s role
10GM acts as the Greater Manchester-wide infrastructure backbone for the VCSE sector within the Live Well programme. Its core purpose is to strengthen, connect, and amplify local infrastructure organisations (LIOs) across all ten boroughs, ensuring that community-led health and wellbeing initiatives are embedded in system-wide strategies. We do this as part of 10GM’s Population Health work, where we’re supporting the VCSE sector to help shape and codesign Live Well. As part of this, we sit on the Live Well Steering Group.
Key functions:
Coordination and Connectivity: 10GM links local action with regional priorities, enabling a coherent yet place-based approach. This ensures that each borough’s delivery reflects local needs while contributing to Greater Manchester’s shared vision for tackling health inequalities.
Empowering Communities: By supporting grassroots organisations and fostering social action, we’re helping communities build resilience and influence decisions that affect their lives.
Advocacy and Representation: 10GM champions the VCSE sector in strategic discussions with GMCA, NHS Greater Manchester, and local authorities, ensuring community voices shape policy and investment.
Capacity Building: We strengthen sector capability through shared learning, collaborative working, and evidence-based approaches, positioning VCSE organisations as credible delivery partners.
Resource Mobilisation: We’re working to secure long-term funding and devolve resources to local organisations, addressing sector fragility and sustainability.
10GM’s approach brings everyone together to tackle deep-rooted inequalities in a way that focuses on people and places. Because we work across the whole system and have strong local connections, we can make sure power and resources reach the communities that need them most. This creates fairness and trust. By linking different communities and experiences, we’re helping Live Well become more than just a programme—it becomes a movement built on local strengths and shared responsibility.
Live Well: Spaces of Hope and Connection – 10GM has secured a major £16.5m investment in community-led spaces
Thanks to National Lottery players, 10GM, on behalf of Greater Manchester Live Well, will receive £16.5 million over four years from The National Lottery Community Fund, the UK’s largest community funder.
This investment in Live Well Spaces of Hope and Connection will create a network of 100+ inclusive, community-led and owned spaces across Greater Manchester where people can meet, belong and find everyday support.
Prioritising communities facing the greatest inequalities, the investment will strengthen social infrastructure and grow community action, power and wealth. Powered by the Live Well movement, VCSE organisations, public services and residents will come together to share power, change systems and shape healthier, fairer, more connected places.
10GM is the programme’s accountable body, with delivery leads in each Local Infrastructure Organisation coordinating work in each borough. GMCA, NHS GM, GM Equality Alliance and The Innovation Unit will play key roles as delivery partners.
Accelerator Sites
In 2023, with funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, we connected NHS Greater Manchester with VCSE groups across Greater Manchester to roll out The National Lottery Community Fund to tackle health and wellbeing inequalities. This launched the Live Well programme, enabling five accelerator sites to lead work to tackle persistent barriers (system change enablers) to Live Well and to shift thinking around the needs and recognition of community-led wellbeing and prevention.
Each site is supported through a series of coaching and peer-support learning spaces to identify and develop its approach to Live Well.
“Enablers” being tested include:
- System leadership
- Collective accountability
- Redefined purpose
- Shared power
Find out more about the work of each site:
Bolton CVS
Working with the Bolton Council Population Health Team, Bolton CVS is developing a ‘Voice and Influence’ model that amplifies the voice and intelligence from Bolton’s communities into spaces where decisions are made.
Key enablers being tested: Shared Power
Action Together (Oldham locality)
With public sector colleagues, Action Together are co-designing and embedding a mechanism for the commissioning of prevention with strong place-based, community-led governance.
Key enablers being tested: Shared Power
Action Together (Rochdale locality)
Working with public sector colleagues in Rochdale, Action Together are shifting power and decision making around Rochdale’s anti-poverty work so that communities are working alongside those with positional power.
Key enablers being tested: Collective accountability and system leadership
Action Together (Tameside locality)
Working with Public and community sector organisations , Action Together are using new and shared outcomes to demonstrate the role of VCSE-led health and wellbeing activity in prevention. They have demonstrated this by using creative data and story gathering methodologies to describe the impact of existing activity and garner greater understanding and support for community-led prevention in Tameside
Key enablers being tested: Collective accountability and redefined purpose
Salford CVS
Working with CommUNITY Little Hulton and public sector colleagues, Salford CVS is finding radical ways of collaborating so that communities can play a leading role in creating happier, healthier lives.
Key enablers being tested: Shared Power
The Live Well Communities Fund
The Live Well Communities Fund was established to explore how funding can be deployed and distributed in ways that are more accessible, inclusive and effective for communities experiencing health inequalities across Greater Manchester. Jointly funded by NHS Greater Manchester and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, in its first year, the fund deployed £1 million in its first year across GM’s 10 localities, managed and distributed by Local Infrastructure Organisations. A separate central fund, focused on communities of geography, identity, and experience, was distributed by the GM Equality Alliance.
In its first year, the Fund tested how a community-led and system-enabled approach to funding can shift power, strengthen relationships and enable local action that supports health, wellbeing and prevention.
Learning from the Communities Fund
Co-designing Change: Local Infrastructure Lessons from the Live Well Communities Fund
Local Infrastructure Organisations have rapidly co-designed and tested innovative approaches to participatory grantmaking, with the aim of shifting power to communities and reducing inequalities. This document shares snapshots from each locality, highlighting new practices and innovations from the fund’s first phase. The work is still in progress, and more updates will follow. A full Learning Pack is also being created by funders and community researchers to share what we’ve learned in the first year.
What’s participatory grantmaking?
Participatory grantmaking is a funding approach where the people and communities who are most affected by the issues being funded are directly involved in making decisions about how grants are awarded.
Live Well Communities Fund Year One Prototype Learning Pack
his Learning Pack is a reflection on Year 1 of the Live Well Communities Fund. In this first year we explored how a grant fund could work in a way that made it easier for marginalised communities who don’t traditionally bid for funding to access the monies. By working with members of the community to understand systems, processes and approaches, the collaborative relationships, understanding and support across the system is strengthened. This Learning Pack is a practical and reflective guide for local partners working towards health equity and inclusion, via community-led and system-enabled funding deployment and distribution. We hope that it will tell the story of the distribution process and be a useful guide to support future funding distribution and embed participatory, collaborative and community-led approaches
Communities Fund: Live Well Inclusion and Partnership Fund for Geographically Dispersed Communities
The GM=EqAL Inclusion and Partnership Fund pilot is a strategic, community-led initiative funded via the Live Well Communities Fund. It aims to prototype inclusive grant-making methods that support geographically dispersed communities—groups who share protected characteristics or experiences of marginalisation but are not concentrated in a single borough. Delivered by GM=EqAL, a pan-equalities coalition, this pilot tests collaborative commissioning and participatory funding principles to address long-standing barriers in mainstream grant processes.
The Inclusion & Wellbeing Partnership Fund – Micro Grants, closed to applications on 15 December 2025 as part of GM=EqAl‘s Live Well Community Fund pilot.
The grants offer up to £1,000 for small, community-led activities that help people connect, create, and improve wellbeing across Greater Manchester, with projects answering ‘How do we Live Well together?’.
This fund is designed for geographically dispersed and intersectional communities – groups that often struggle to access locality-based funding.
Long-term investment into the Communities Fund
We’re working with the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity (GMCC) and NHS Greater Manchester to explore a long-term plan to drive investment into the sector through new philanthropic and corporate investment streams, to build a strong Live Well Communities Fund that tackles inequalities across Greater Manchester.
Economic Trailblazer
Greater Manchester has been selected as one of eight Trailblazer areas in the UK Government’s Get Britain Working White Paper, which sets out reforms to support people towards work.
Over the coming year, Greater Manchester (GM) will test and embed new ways of supporting people furthest from the labour market to move towards employment and training.
Each of the 10 localities in GM has developed a delivery plan to drive this ambition. Alongside this, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), Local Authorities, Greater Manchester Integrated Care, and voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCSE) sector partners are co-designing a shared vision and framework for employment support that reflects the values and strengths of our communities.
VSNW and 10GM are working with GMCA to understand the implications of the programme for VCSE organisations and help inform local authorities on how to make the most of their local VCSE sector.
Manchester Community Central is leading this work on behalf of 10GM.
Neighbourhood Models
Based on existing locality examples, the neighbourhood model intends to bring together public services and partners around local institutions like schools and GPs, with co-located teams, shared resources, and new roles (e.g. community coordinators). There will be daily multidisciplinary meetings to support joined-up responses to interventions, including employment support, housing standards and support, social prescribing, and management of long-term conditions – such as diabetes and CVD. This approach aims to make it easier to respond to the needs of a community, helping prevent people from being admitted to the hospital or needing crisis-based care through Live Well approach.
VCSEs are key to delivering holistic, place-based support. The model could offer opportunities for deeper integration, influence in local planning, and access to investment—but also requires collaboration, data-sharing, and alignment with system goals.
More information on this work will be shared as it emerges.
Prevention Demonstrator
Greater Manchester has been chosen as the UK’s first national Prevention Demonstrator. This means we will be the first area to show how providing joined-up support and helping people earlier can improve health and wellbeing, while making better use of public money.
We were chosen because local organisations already work closely together, with strong links between VCSE organisations, health services, councils, and businesses, and because decisions about many local services are already made in Greater Manchester (devolution).
As Live Well expands across Greater Manchester, the Prevention Demonstrator will help speed up its rollout and evidence what difference it is making. Data and AI will be used to identify people who may need support and track things like residents’ experiences, the impact on staff, pressures on services, and longer-term outcomes for local people.
All ten areas of Greater Manchester will be changing how public services work through Live Well, but four localities (Manchester, Rochdale, Stockport, and Wigan) will be going further and helping design, test and evaluate now.
Briefings and Updates
Governance updates
12 February 2026
The Live Well Board will provide overall direction and leadership for the Live Well programme as it is scaled and embedded across Greater Manchester.
Nominated by existing networks to ensure coverage across the sector, including local infrastructure, equalities and VCFSE providers, the three reps are:
- Darren Knight, CEO, George House Trust – nominated by the Alternative Provider Collaborative.
- Jo McGrath, CEO, Sector 3 Stockport – nominated by the LIO (Local Infrastructure Organisation) Network.
- Sam Palmer, CEO, Respect for All – nominated by the GM Equality Alliance (GM=EqAl).
The role of the VCSE reps is to work collaboratively with Greater Manchester partners, across health, families, housing, wellbeing, advice, and safety. They will channel VCSE sector expertise in prevention, neighbourhood working and community-led approaches into the delivery of Live Well – in particular, the development of Live Well Centres, Spaces and Offers and the integration of services within neighbourhoods.
Live Well VCSE Briefing: August 2025
This briefing highlights how local infrastructure organisations are driving and supporting the Live Well movement across Greater Manchester. Over the past year, localities have tested participatory grant making, begun developing flagship Live Well Centres, Spaces and Offers, learned from Accelerator Sites, and explored the Neighbourhood Model to join up services around communities. Alongside this, GM has been selected as an Economic Inactivity Trailblazer Site. Together, this work shows how local infrastructure and the wider VCSE sector are central to shaping the next phase of Live Well.
What’s next?
As the Live Well movement evolves, we’ll keep the sector updated on both current and emerging workstreams as soon as details are confirmed or clarified. Follow us on LinkedIn or Bluesky to be the first to know.
How can I get involved?
To connect to this work in your locality, contact your local infrastructure organisation. If you want to get involved at a Greater Manchester level, get in touch with 10GM.
Content last reviewed on 2 September 2026
