Adult social care is not short of promising ideas. The harder problem is translation.
Over the past six months, we’ve worked with London Social Ventures on the Impact Launchpad, a programme designed to explore how research-led ideas can be tested in real care contexts.
The central question was simple:
How do we help people stay well, in the place they call home, for as long as possible?
Across the programme, 72 people were reached through more than 90 hours of engagement. Two very different ideas were tested with communities, care homes, staff and partners.
Connect Culture with Care – A culturally tailored dementia awareness approach, delivered through trusted South Asian community settings. Sessions were delivered in familiar community spaces, with trusted facilitators who could speak to people’s cultural context, questions and concerns about dementia.
This pilot showed the power of community-led delivery, where trust, language and cultural relevance are not “nice to have”, but essential to reaching people earlier and supporting informed decisions.
Storysharing – A structured storytelling approach to support people with dementia and communication challenges. In care homes, the work focused on helping staff notice, invite and sometimes even create opportunities for everyday stories from residents whose communication is often overlooked.
“They enjoyed listening to each other’s stories. After the sessions, they would go out into communal areas, and they were talking to other residents about their stories. And when other family members came they talked about it to them.”
Jenny Freeman, Upminster Nursing Home
This pilot reminded us that person-centred care starts with knowing the person, and that even in busy care settings, creating space for stories can transform connection, communication and care quality.
Across both pilots, a few themes stood out:
- Trust is infrastructure – Whether in community groups or care homes, delivery only works when it is rooted in existing relationships.
- Readiness matters – Adoption depends on the confidence, capacity and context of the setting.
- Simplicity enables scale – To travel further, both models need lighter, more accessible entry points, without losing what makes them powerful.
- People, not just models – Both pilots reinforced that change happens through people, facilitators, staff, volunteers, families, not just through tools or interventions.
So what does this mean for the bigger picture? There is a clear connection to the growing shift toward Neighbourhood Health.
Both pilots point to a future where care is:
- more local (rooted in communities and neighbourhoods)
- more relational (built on trust, stories and lived experience)
- more preventative (supporting people earlier, before crisis)
- more integrated (bridging community, primary care and social care)
If neighbourhood health is about wrapping support around people’s lives, then initiatives like these show what that looks like on the ground.
The Impact Launchpad has helped move both projects beyond early ideas into something more tangible. Not just “does this work?”, but what would it take for this to work at scale?
We’re excited to see where both go next. And how the learning from this programme can continue to shape more connected, community-powered models of care.
