Transforming Together

Transforming Together: Building place-based networks to improve services for women is a network of professionals, local decision-makers, and women with lived experience working together to improve support for women with multiple unmet needs in the North East.

Transforming Together's origins

The network emerged from Transforming Services for Women’s Futures, a collaborative research project seeking to understand the experiences of women seeking support in Northumberland and Tyne & Wear, and how public services could be redesigned post-pandemic to better support women and girls with multiple unmet needs.

Research was conducted with a local ‘community of practice’, made up of those with both lived and learned experience of women’s multiple unmet needs in the region.

This work culminated in the publication of Dismantling Disadvantage (2023), a major report which found that, in 2021, a woman in the North East of England was 1.7x more likely to die early as a result of suicide, addiction, or murder by a partner or family member than in the rest of England and Wales. The research found that failures by public services to provide appropriate support was a contributing factor, and serves as an urgent wake-up call for ‘levelling up’ efforts to combat regional inequality and a post-code lottery for support.

As a result, the Transforming Together network was formed, with the intention of driving forward the report’s recommendations and working towards genuine systems-change within the region.

Who belongs to the network?

The Transforming Together network is made up of women with lived experience and multi-agencies who have a keen interest in improving practice and policy for women with multiple unmet needs.

Frontline practitioners within the membership span women’s (including specialist by-and-for) services, housing, criminal justice and public health, working alongside women with lived experience, local decision-makers such as Police Crime Commissioners, and representatives from local authorities, Integrated Care Boards and the prison service.

Many involved remain engaged from the initial community of practice that began in 2022.

Find a list of some of the network’s members here.

The network's purpose

Transforming Together recognises and responds to the need for systems-change within public services, to provide better support for women experiencing multiple unmet needs in the North East.

Central to Transforming Together is a commitment to ensuring the voices of women are at the heart of all network activity. A model of centering lived experience remains its driving force.

The network and its members are currently focusing work around three collectively agreed priorities:

1. Data, information sharing and evidence
2. Commissioning, funding and power sharing
3. Collaboration and convening

The future of the network

Longer term, the project aims to demonstrate the power of co-production and embedding lived experience across public service design, whilst becoming self-sustaining beyond Agenda Alliance’s involvement.

It will also offer valuable learning and a model for how devolution could assume a collaborative, whole-systems approach to better support women with multiple unmet needs.

The project was funded by Smallwood Trust and is delivered in partnership with Changing Lives.