“They weren’t hard to reach; they were just rarely listened to.” That insight captures what Gaunless Gateway’s Big Local journey reveals about the real power of community-led change.
Learning from Big Local launched today, a new website showcasing the impact of the Big Local programme set up by The National Lottery Community Fund in 2010. The programme supports long-term, resident-led change, and Gaunless Gateway in Bishop Auckland is one of 150 neighbourhoods across England to receive more than £1 million. To mark the launch, Barbara from Gaunless Gateway reflects on a decade of local action, the changes it brought, and what others can learn from the experience.
When Big Local began, Gaunless Gateway faced significant challenges. A high proportion of children were living in poverty, violent crime rates were worrying, and anti-social behaviour far exceeded national averages. Yet residents knew their community was more than these statistics. Big Local provided the opportunity to take a resident-led, community-focused approach that addressed local priorities and built a legacy designed to last well beyond the programme’s official end in March 2026.
For Barbara, the most important shift was trust. Communities often described as “hard to reach” were, in reality, simply not being heard. Big Local offered time, flexibility, and belief in residents’ ideas. That trust allowed small concepts to grow into lasting initiatives, from a double-decker bus transformed into a mobile soft-play space to creative collectives, inclusive employers, and social enterprises that now bring dozens of people together each month. These projects succeeded because they were shaped and owned by local people, even when progress was slow and imperfect.
Over ten years, Gaunless Gateway recorded more than 21,000 partnership volunteer hours, supported over a hundred small grants, and helped create new projects, businesses, and sustainable jobs. Volunteers became entrepreneurs, apprentices became company directors, and local talent found pathways to employment. The partnership invested in social infrastructure, employment support, creative arts, crisis services, and skills development, while building strong collaborations with other organisations and agencies.
A major focus was ensuring impact beyond the funding period. By strengthening local organisations and supporting social enterprises like Bridge Creative, the partnership worked to create a resilient network capable of attracting future funding and continuing to support residents, including young people and adults with autism and other learning disabilities.
The journey also highlighted wider lessons. Too often, communities are consulted only after decisions are made, or a small number of voices dominate discussions. Gaunless Gateway learned to insist on genuine co-production and to recognise lived experience as real expertise. Sharing local stories on national platforms, including parliamentary groups and sector events, helped influence policy and demonstrated that neighbourhood-level trust can lead to change that scales far beyond one place.
Today, the impact of Big Local in Gaunless Gateway is visible in both practical outcomes and cultural change. Residents have not only built projects and jobs, but also confidence and new ways of working together. Learning from Big Local brings these lessons together, telling the stories of all 150 areas and offering the most comprehensive evidence base on resident-led neighbourhood renewal in the UK.
Designed for policymakers, funders, researchers, and community practitioners, the website allows users to explore themes such as community change, youth investment, and crisis response. It shows what is possible when communities are trusted to lead.
The message from Gaunless Gateway is simple and powerful: communities do not need fixing, they need trusting. Big Local proved that when residents are given time, space, and belief, they can become authors of their own future—and that is the legacy worth backing.
