Bristol City Council working with their local VCFSE sector

Bristol City Council is keen for there to be ‘no wrong front door’ for families seeking to access support and provision. To increase accessibility to Family Hubs and the breadth of support available, their Family Hub Programme has sought to partner with the local VCFSE sector, who are already supporting families in the city through sustainable, trusted relationships and grassroots projects.

One part of the voluntary and community sector which is often overlooked is faith groups. Faith groups deliver many Family Hub services, including mums’ and toddlers groups, food banks, warm spaces, advice groups, counselling, youth clubs, evidence-based parenting classes and antenatal classes. One piece of research undertaken by the Gather Movement even found that up to 52% of children in England have accessed church-based parent and toddler groups by age four (find out more here). Faith communities are diverse in structure, culture and practice and provision can also be informal, relational and embedded in everyday community life. As a result, the Family Hubs programme has built a relationship with and commissioned Good Faith Partnership, a social consultancy with expertise of the local faith sector, to aid greater partnership working between Family Hubs and local faith groups in Bristol. Good Faith Partnership worked in collaboration with cultural competency expert, Anira Khokhar, to integrate faith-specialist insight and a culturally competent approach and therefore maximise engagement across faith communities.

Good Faith Partnership was first commissioned by Bristol City Council’s Family Hubs Programme in 2024. Following an in-person, cross-city event to introduce Family Hubs staff to faith-based providers and vice versa, the decision was made to deepen these conversations through a series of workshops with three main aims: 1. To build awareness of Family Hubs, and Faith-based offers for the purpose of multi-directional signposting 2. To learn from the grassroots knowledge and expertise that Faith Leaders have of local family needs 3. To explore what partnership working could look like in the future This work also aimed to deepen understanding of how different faith communities engage with services, and what adaptations are needed to ensure inclusive access across Bristol’s diverse ethnic and faith landscape.

In order to ensure the right people were in the room, Good Faith Partnership were first commissioned to undertake a mapping exercise of faith-based children and families provision on offer. This mapping found 112 faith-based children and families activities within a one-mile radius of the three Family Hub campuses in Bristol, including toddler groups, antenatal classes, sports clubs and mentoring for teenagers.

In January 2025, we hosted three locality-based workshops to bring faith leaders together with professionals from across the family hubs system. Over 50 stakeholders attended the workshops, but most of the faith leaders were from Christian churches. The workshop attendance reflects, in part, the way churches are structured and resourced. Many have established roles supporting families and community life. They also have buildings that are routinely used for group activities. These factors can help explain why churches often align more easily with local authority delivery of services such as family hubs and why their involvement in partnership working becomes more visible. 

Our engagement identified differences in the structures by which other faith communities support families. Learning from Muslim communities has shown that some of the most trusted and influential support for children and families operates through informal, relational networks, often led by women. These community-led groups typically sit outside mosque leadership structures and the formal role of imams. Meaning they are less visible to local authority systems. However, they play a critical role in reaching families, building trust, and breaking down barriers to access to family hub services.

The workshop learning has reinforced the importance of taking different approaches to partnership working. While collaboration with churches may sit more naturally within formal delivery structures, engaging meaningfully with other faith communities requires time and investment in relationship-based, community-led approaches. This approach will ultimately reflect how different faiths organise and experience support on the ground. Working differently across faith contexts is not a limitation; it is a necessary and progressive response to diversity and a core requirement for delivering equitable, practical support for families. 

Across the board, the workshops highlighted low awareness and understanding of Family Hubs. Barriers to engagement from faith groups who were less well represented include inaccessible language and terminology, limited cultural competency, and insufficient time invested in trust-building. These factors contributed to reduced engagement despite significant levels of need. The workshops served to introduce Family Hubs to many faith leaders who noted the value of the resources available on the Family Hubs website.

At the workshops, faith leaders had the opportunity to share some of the key challenges they were observing in their neighbourhoods, ranging from teenage mental health, parents’ relational dysfunction and gang violence and recruitment. These conversations not only served to give faith leaders an opportunity to pass on their learnings to strategic decision makers, and highlight where they would benefit from further training (namely, supporting children with SEND and teenage mental health), but also to demonstrate the integral need for wraparound support for families and open communication between the statutory and voluntary services that are supporting them.

Following the workshops, Bristol City Council’s Family Hubs programme has sought to provide further opportunities for faith-based providers of CYP to build connections with one another and the Family Hubs teams. A newsletter and three local Family Hub Alliances have been started in order to provide the infrastructure required for the faith sector to stay in-the-know with Family Hubs offer, and signpost appropriately. The alliances and newsletter are also a great space for the Family Hubs team and faith leaders to co-produce activities and share funding and training opportunities. , A key recommendation from the workshops was the creation of an interactive map featuring all faith-based CYP provision.

The Good Faith Partnership have therefore been commissioned to create, release and socialise this map which will be launched in March 2026. This map will be hosted on Bristol City Council’s Family Hubs website and will be accessible to Family Hubs staff, faith leaders, and members of the community. The map will incorporate faith-based services into the broader picture of what local families understand is ‘on offer’ to them, making the most of the economically sustainable and relationally rich work of the faith sector. It will also serve as an effective signposting resource for Family Hubs navigators to point families to services which are more culturally appropriate or local to them. In addition, the resource will help faith leaders to build relationships with one another and become greater informed internally, serving to make faith-based offers more complementary, with less duplication.

Alongside the development of the map, AK & Co Consultancy, led by Anira Khokhar, have been awarded a Test and Learn Race and Multilingual Equality Grant by Bristol City Council. This work has involved direct consultation with families from diverse ethnic backgrounds, particularly mothers with children under four, many of whom are connected to faith communities but remain underrepresented in formal engagement processes. Barriers identified include service location outside trusted community spaces, language and literacy challenges, cultural insensitivity in service design, lack of consistent relationships, and mistrust shaped by previous experiences of statutory services. These findings will be incorporated into the socialisation of map as well as the broader work of the Family Hubs team through seeking multilingual, culturally appropriate facilitation beyond single-event consultation, and engaging trusted community connectors to ensure families’ voices meaningfully shape service improvement through consistent communication and follow-through.

Sara Goodfellow (Bristol City Council), Anira Khokhar and Alisha Palmer (Good Faith Partnership)

For further information, please contact: [email protected]

Good Faith Partnership is a national consultancy with a presence in, and longstanding relationships with Bristol’s VCFSE and public sector. At the national scale, their ChurchWorks project is also interested in exploring how churches may partner with their local authorities on Family Hubs. Their Family Hubs Toolkit is an inspiring and practical web-based guide to help churches and local authorities collaborate and offer life-changing support for families through the Family Hubs model.

Created by ChurchWorks, Spurgeons, Gather Movement and Exodus Youth Worx UK, this toolkit will benefit any church or local authority, no matter what stage of partnership they are at! With helpful checklists, templates and case studies, the toolkit equips both Local Authorities and churches with an understanding of one another’s assets, a shared language and vision, and clear next steps for collaboration.

The Toolkit is entirely free to access and use, and is endorsed by the members of the ChurchWorks Commission.