Sussex Community Foundation raises funds and awards grants to address local needs across West Sussex, East Sussex and Brighton & Hove. To direct its resources effectively, the Foundation needs a strong understanding of the diverse communities it serves, including the challenges they face, the strengths they can build on and the substantial differences between places within Sussex.
As part of its corporate strategy, the Foundation identified four funding priorities: Tackling Poverty, Improving Health, Reaching Potential and Acting on Climate. Following an earlier partnership with OCSI, the Foundation commissioned us to support the development of Sussex Uncovered, an evidence programme designed to establish a comprehensive baseline of need across the county. To date, we have produced reports focused on Tackling Poverty, Reaching Potential and Improving Health.
Each report needed to combine robust data with a clear and accessible account of what the evidence meant for Sussex. County-wide figures can conceal significant inequalities between local authorities, major towns, rural communities and individual neighbourhoods. The work therefore needed to identify both the most visible concentrations of need and the smaller pockets that risk being hidden within wider averages.
The Foundation wanted the reports to give staff and trustees, donors, fundholders, statutory bodies, voluntary organisations and grassroots community groups a clearer understanding of local needs and the evidence to inform funding, decisions and action. It also wanted the findings to reach wider audiences through repurposing the content for funding materials, events, campaigns, newsletters, blogs, social media and their website.
For each report, we worked with Sussex Community Foundation to agree on a set of themes and indicators reflecting the relevant funding priority. We reviewed the available data, identified the measures that would provide the clearest picture of local need and structured the analysis around the questions most important to the Foundation and the organisations it supports.
The Tackling Poverty report examined financial hardship, exclusion from the labour market, homelessness, fuel poverty and the barriers experienced by groups including disabled people, people from ethnic minority communities, migrants and LGBTQ+ communities. We assessed how these pressures varied across Sussex and explored the ways in which different forms of disadvantage overlapped, including the concentration of multiple challenges in coastal communities.
For Reaching Potential, we analysed inequalities in educational attainment, further and higher education participation, training and adult skills. We also examined the experiences of people facing additional barriers to learning and opportunity, including children in need, looked after children, pupils receiving free school meals, people with learning disabilities or neurodiversity and people experiencing language barriers or social isolation.
The Improving Health report explored inequalities in physical and mental health, access to local health services and the experiences of groups facing particular barriers to healthcare and wellbeing. This included children and adults with disabilities or life-limiting illnesses, young people experiencing mental health challenges, older people, unpaid carers and people from ethnic minority communities.
Across the reports, we analysed performance at multiple geographic levels, covering local authorities, major towns, rural areas and neighbourhoods. We compared Sussex with regional and national benchmarks and examined which places were experiencing the most acute challenges, falling behind comparator areas or facing several related pressures at once.
We presented the findings through narrative analysis supported by data visualisations. This allowed us to explain the high-level story for Sussex while drawing attention to geographic inequalities, emerging trends, hotspots and hidden pockets of need. We also produced supplementary appendices containing additional analysis and visualisations, providing access to the full evidence base while keeping the main reports focused and accessible.
Through the Sussex Uncovered series, we delivered three thematic reports that give Sussex Community Foundation a consistent and detailed evidence base for understanding poverty, opportunity and health across the county.
Ensure you’re targeting the places with the greatest need
See how challenges vary between neighbourhoods, where they overlap and where hidden pockets of need may otherwise be missed
Use our analysis to support decision making, policy planning and improve funding bids
Ensuring local projects are backed by an understanding of the people and...
Identifying where limited community infrastructure overlaps with economic deprivation across Wales.