Community champions are people who live or work in Ealing who want to make a positive difference to the health and wellbeing of their communities.
What do community champions do?
As a network of individuals and local organisations, champions use their passion, life experience and skills to inspire their communities to thrive. They make a big difference by starting conversations about the issues that are affecting their community’s health and wellbeing and signposting them to relevant support and services. Through these conversations and connections to the programme, champions empower their friends, family, neighbours and wider connections to lead healthy lives and flourish.
As trusted figures in their own networks, champions also help the council and partner organisations understand what the health and wellbeing priorities are in our 7 towns by feeding back what is working well and what improvements are needed. Community champions from communities currently underrepresented and most affected by health inequalities are crucial to creating sustainable change in the places that need it most.
What you will get as a community champion
Flexibility – champions volunteer during their own time. Whether you are in full-time work or seeking new opportunities, you contribute what you can, when you can. You can be as creative and as innovative as you like in how you work with us and your communities.
Ongoing support and networking – through our WhatsApp group and programme team sat within public health there is always someone on hand to help. We are proud of the diversity of our community champions and create lots of opportunities to share ideas, link community projects and organisations and amplify your voices.
Regular meetings and training – you will hear from us every fortnight in our email newsletter. As a group, we meet every 2 months to learn and talk about the building blocks of health in our forums. This year, we’ve learned and spoken about the cost of living, food, housing and parenting, alongside breast and bowel cancer screening and the menopause. We also hold the occasional workshop and seminar outside of these meetings too!
We offer all champions mental health first aid training and qualification through Mental Health First Aid England.
Becoming a community champion can help you:
- make sure what matters to you and your communities is heard and talked about
- connect with like-minded community champions across the borough
- take part in projects where you can learn new skills and amplify the voice of your community
- support people in your local community, inspiring them to become healthier and happier
- find out more about how to live a healthy lifestyle
- develop your communication, networking and influencing skills
If this sounds like something you’d like to be involved with, apply now