HACT – An age-friendly Bradford
4th March 2025
Supporting an age-friendly Bradford
Creating an age-friendly Bradford District, with investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and innovative social landlords, HACT (Housing Associations’ Charitable Trust) and partners have run a two-year programme that aims to support social landlords, local agencies, and communities to work together to improve opportunities and outcomes for over 50’s living in Bradford.
What we did.
Community Action Bradford & District engaged to deliver the legacy phase (the final six months) of the programme in Bradford, to deliver age friendly projects and influencing activity alongside housing associations in the area.
Community Action provided sector support through the Age Friendly Social Housing Programme, encompassing four key activity areas.
- First, we mapped and promoted social connection initiatives and assessed their impact.
- Second, we facilitated Make It Happen grants, a small grants scheme to support age friendly activity.
- Third, we convened cross-sector roundtables to promote age friendly practices.
- Finally, we facilitated connections with City of Bradford City Metropolitan District Council, and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, enabling strategic influence.
How we delivered this work
We delivered this work in a packaged up into program reports for HACT.
Collaboratively, we have furthered the age-friendly principles agenda in the Bradford District. Through social connection activities, needs assessments, partnership development, facilitated discussions and case studies, we have highlighted best practice and moved the conversation forward. This has highlighted the value of older residents within the district.
Through this project, we fostered ongoing communication and collaboration with the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture programme. We created educational resources, disseminated through blog posts, guides, and toolkits for partner organisations.
Examples of our work is on the HACT website. Alternatively, in the download link below. Community Action is very proud of this work and its positive impact on the older community and the organisations supporting them.
Download the impact report we put together for HACT by clicking the image or this link (download size 13.1mb)
How did we do?
HACT have provided Community Action Bradford and District feedback for the services they received from us during this project. We were very pleased we have been able to deliver on this project, as promised. Our exceptional customer satisfaction metric has been reached again!
“I was really impressed with the positive response to our initial enquiry – was met with a speedy reply, keen interest and a creative approach to look at how we could work together (rather than any focus on barriers to working together).
I really liked we could draw up a pragmatic workplan to sit alongside the formal contract document and felt I worked with experienced professionals who knew what they were doing and knew the local area.
I was mindful we had a slower start than hoped but appreciate external forces (re-commissioning contracts in the local area etc) were outside of our control. Really impressed with the final outcome and how we were able to move something forward that had stalled for quite some time and achieve positive impact in the community.” – Rebecca Riley
“We had a very positive experience collaborating with CABAD and the team’s knowledge of the local system and services was brilliant. It helped us to move a project forward that had been stalling and create positive impact in the community.” – Rebecca Riley
