The aim of this project is to provide comprehensive data on the contemporary population of third sector organisations in the UK. We will create one accessible & robust data resource that will help charities, third sector infrastructure bodies, funders & policymakers develop a fuller understanding of the sector. In effect this data resource will accurately map the full membership of the third sector. We will then use the growing body of data being made available on grantmaking to voluntary organisations, and on public procurement, to build resources which will allow researchers to improve understanding of the funding mix of third sector organisations. The resources we create will help third sector organisations and policy makers because it will improve their understanding of their environment, particularly funding opportunities & also potential competitors or collaborators. This means they will be able to better support their beneficiaries by, for example, targeting their services or co-operating with similar organisations. The data will meet administrative & research challenges facing the sector by providing a "spine" for the growing number of open data initiatives. This new data infrastructure will add new value to existing UK social science infrastructure, and will be able to be reused by academic and non-academic researchers (such as those working in government). This data will also help the Office for National Statistics as they work to improve coverage of non-profit organisations in the National Accounts (see letters of support). It is consistent with ESRC's strategic priorities such as a "Vibrant and fair society", in that it significantly enhances understanding of the resources of third sector organisations. The project will: Building on TSRC/NCVO's existing databases, generated by combining registers of charities and the Companies House register of companies, we will: Classify organisations in the dataset - We will develop & publish a method for classifying existing organisations (there remain considerable gaps in our classification of the many organisations that are nonprofit but which are also not charitable) & new organisations that come onto the register. This will enable users to select data for particular subsets of the sector, or for organisations operating in particular areas. - Develop a website where this data can be hosted & accessed, with the ability to generate a list of specific organisations. Match the data with other data sources - Develop & publish a method & tools for matching a list of organisations to these databases, based on their name and any other information. This will make it easy to bring together other lists of organisations. - Matching with lists of grant recipients published by grant makers. The main source of these lists will be the "360 Giving" initiative which is encouraging grantmakers to open up data about who they fund but we will work with other major funders. Published data already includes several hundred thousand awards made to voluntary organisations. We will also work with grantmakers to help them securely look at more detailed data - including data on applications for funding, making analyses of these possible for the first time. - Matching with lists of government spending, particularly local government. These lists, often running to several hundred thousand transactions, contain an entry for every organisation that has received money from government departments or authorities. Because of the challenges involved in this - there are over 400 local authorities in England, with much variation in the quality of information - we will pilot this work in a selected region. The project represents an excellent example of a partnership between a strong academic research centre, TSRC, and a high-profile national voluntary organisation, NCVO, in which research is designed and developed with the needs of user and academic communities equally in mind.

'Change in the Making' is an exciting and unique study of change in the third sector over time. To our knowledge, nothing like it has been attempted elsewhere, and the changes and challenges in the operating environment for the third sector make it extremely timely. Our project investigates the ways in which change is negotiated, created and contested by a range of different stakeholders in diverse third sector settings. It focuses attention on organisations as contested spaces of collective action, involving the interplay of multiple stakeholders, such as paid staff, volunteers, service users and commissioners, all with different interests. The study will build on, extend and enhance the Third Sector Research Centre's ground-breaking long term 'Real Times' programme of research with third sector organisations carried out between 2010 and 2014. Change in the Making is a timely study given the challenges facing voluntary organisations at the present time. It will be of great value for those interested in how third sector activities are sustained, and in how third sector organisations adapt to change over time. The 'Real Times' study followed the fortunes of a set of third sector case studies through an unsettled environment, involving a combination of political and institutional change and a challenging financial context, particularly for organisations drawing on public funds to carry out their work. Hence the original research charted the first years of adjustment to austerity. Change in the Making takes the story forward through three further intensive waves of fieldwork, over four years, with four of the original case studies. In line with the study's aims we deepen the analysis of the longitudinal case studies by broadening the range of research participants at each case study site, and we place their experience in context by situating the case studies within wider field developments. A focus on a smaller number of cases allows us to refresh and deepen our research questions. The longitudinal approach facilitates a longer term perspective on the rhythms of organisational change and continuity. By the end of the proposed study we will have engaged with the case study organisations for nearly ten years from 2010 through to 2019, i.e. surviving through an initial period of austerity, but with uncertain prospects in the years ahead. We know already how these organisations and activities have survived through to 2014, but what happens next, and more specifically how is what happens next shaped by different influences and stakeholders? The study informs and advances academic debates on conceptualisation of, change in, and the character of, the third sector. It is of great relevance to policy and practice debates because it provides great insights into how change is made and experienced in the third sector on an everyday basis. It develops our understanding of how third sector organisations really work in practice, through its in-depth engagement with individual organisations. No other British study has been able to do this. It informs the development of policy and practice for and in the third sector, by providing real and vivid insights into the everyday dilemmas, pressures and practices of third sector organisational life, and thus shaping more realistic accounts of third sector activities than currently prevail. It extends the study of third sector activities over time and it thereby contributes a unique and innovative organisational dimension to the growing body of qualitative longitudinal work in the social sciences. It has the potential to impact upon third sector policy, practice and discourse: to influence the development of practice through bulding capacity within the third sector and to create conceptual impact through reframing the debate about third sector organisations and their role in society.

Although there is a long history of social work and other practitioners involving wider family in trying to resolve difficulties faced by particular family members, the evidence base to support this activity has been relatively weak. Since the early 1990s, a number of developments in law, policy and performance management have had the perhaps unintended consequence of directing agencies and practitioners to focus on specific needs and risks relating to particular individuals, rather than seeing the 'bigger picture' of how family networks actually operate and what might be their potential to provide more effective support or resolve issues for those experiencing difficulties. In more recent years, there has been increasing recognition at government level that this tendency has been counter-productive in terms of delivering services that actually enable people to resolve or manage their difficulties - and has instead resulted in responses that are both costly and can hook people into an unnecessary longer term dependence on a range of public services. However, there has been much less clarity as how best to turn around approaches to service delivery and what might be the best models for delivering services that engage the potential of families and their social networks. Policy initiatives such as 'Think Family' and 'Troubled Families' have fostered the development of new models and ways of working at a local level and in a variety of organisational contexts. From recent research studies and evaluations, we now have some emerging evidence as to 'what works' within specific service contexts - and also what may be barriers to implementing such approaches within existing organisational structures and processes. However, our understanding is far from complete - and what we currently know has not yet been pulled together across different service contexts in a systematic way that can be shared more widely with policy and practice organisations. It is the purpose of this proposal to bring together academic and practice communities to facilitate an interchange of knowledge, ideas and evidence that can be used to drive forward effective and innovatory practice - with different service sectors learning from one another. Maximum impact would be achieved by three linked areas of work: A. Building links within and between organisations to enable a two-way flow that brings in new knowledge and understanding from outside and, in return, gives space for reflection and evaluation of how service innovations are actually working (or not working) as they are applied on the ground. B. A programme of knowledge exchange seminars and more informal workshops that bring together service managers and practitioners from across health, social care and the voluntary sector, with a particular emphasis on building bridges between services in different sectors. C. Development of a protected 'partners' website for informal exchange of information and discussion of ideas in development. This would provide a platform for developing research summaries, descriptions of effective service models, discussion papers and training resources. Once developed, these would then be made publically accessible via the Family Potential Research Centre website for practitioners and managers. Taken together, these three strands of knowledge exchange activity will achieve direct impact on policies and models of service delivery within around thirty participating organisations during the lifetime of the project. Beyond this, it will have wider cross-sector impact through making available the resources that have been developed, so that they can be utilised by other organisations who are facing similar challenges of how to to introduce ways of working that see beyond the individual, and mobilise the potential of wider family relationships in improving and sustaining positive outcomes for family members.

The communities and neighbourhoods where we grow up have a lifelong influence on the illnesses we get and how long we live. Health is about avoiding disease and having a long life, but is also about feeling well in mind and body, feeling safe, being part of a community and having things to look forward to. Many aspects of the world around us influence our health directly or influence health related behaviours. These so called "broader" determinants of health include the houses and flats we live in, the design of our roads and high streets, the availability and quality of parks, green spaces, libraries, galleries, museums, sports and recreational facilities, entertainment opportunities, places and events to connect with others, the shops and businesses around us, pollution levels, learning opportunities, the jobs available to us and whether we have enough money to make ends meet and to participate in social activities. Attempts to change health related behaviours such as unhealthy eating, drinking, smoking and lack of exercise, have met with important but limited success. For example, increased awareness of links between childhood obesity and ill health and the importance of exercise and healthy diet will have limited success if broader determinants are not also tackled. These broader determinants include, but are not limited to, the many fast food outlets that children may walk past, lack of access to high quality play and recreational facilities, sell off of school playing fields, streets that are not safe for children to walk or cycle to school, lack of high quality green spaces for exercise, shops with poor choice of healthy foods, increased screen time replacing physical activity, poor quality of school food, and, for some, insufficient income to buy healthy food. Our ActEarly approach focuses on improving the health of children in two contrasting areas with high levels of child poverty, Bradford in Yorkshire and Tower Hamlets in London. In preparation for this work we have worked with local communities, local authorities and other local organisations and have established shared priority areas for research: Healthy Places, Healthy Learning and Healthy Livelihoods. We have brought together experts in these themes with local community and local authority representatives to begin to develop a range of approaches to improving child health across these areas. For example, within our Healthy Places theme we will work together to: map local community assets and to understand how they can be improved and used by more people; develop a Healthy Streets approach and improve green space quality. In our Healthy Learning theme we will work together to develop local "Evidence Active Networks" of pre-school, school and community learning venues. These networks will help develop and evaluate a wide range of approaches to improve child health. In our Healthy Livelihoods theme we will work together on approaches such as relocation of welfare advice services to improve access, enabling parental leave, ensuring a minimum basic income in school leavers, providing life skills training and involving local communities in decisions on how to spend local authority budgets. To understand the effect of these approaches on child health we will develop strong data resources that bring together existing information from across our localities to measure changes in the local environment, health related behaviours and health outcomes. Teams of researchers will use this data and work with local communities to understand how successful our initiatives have been. We describe our emphasis on early life interventions, our highly collaborative approach and development of local data sources to enable evaluation of multiple initiatives, as the "ActEarly Collaboratory". We hope the approach will promote a fairer and healthier future for children and a global example of how to work with communities to improve health.