Rippling in Wigan – action learning

This is a long read and acts as an online repository of learning resources collected as part of a ripple effect capacity building programme in Wigan. Funded by a successful application to Awards for All, convened by Northern Heart and Soul CiC; facilitated by Peoples Voice Media with a reflection session hosted by Mindful by Nature.  

It offers learning from 9 organisations and groups and the people they rippled with. The action learning research ran from November 2024 to July 2025.

If like me you are wondering if this is worth your time to read and want to know the punchline now – it demonstrates the power of peer support with creativity at its core.

Here you’ll find:

Why Ripple? – an introduction and rationale

Programme Overview – what we did together

The Ripplers – who took part and the interrelations and connections

The Learning – what everyone did and learned

Sense Making – what emerged

Reflections and Proposals

Why Ripple?

Northern Heart and Soul CiC first experienced Ripple Effect Mapping through the Association of Camerados as participants in the process.  They felt so personally moved by the experience – the deep personal learning, along with the creativity of capturing all that is usually unsaid and unmeasured that they decided to play more with it themselves.  They did as a team, and began to see its potential both as a useful tool to demonstrate their own mission and as a community building tool in itself.  The ripples from the act of ripple effect mapping itself were clear to see and it truly felt like learning belonged to the people involved. 

Why Ripple?Northern Heart and Soul CiC first experienced Ripple Effect Mapping with the Association of Camerados as participants in the process.  They felt so personally moved by the experience – the deep personal learning, along with the creativity of capturing all that is usually unsaid and unmeasured that they decided to play around with it more.  They did as a team, and began to see its potential both as a useful tool to demonstrate their own mission and as a community building tool in itself.  The ripples from the action of ripple effect mapping itself were clear to see and it truly felt like learning belonged to the people involved.  Peoples Voice Media had hosted the workshops on behalf of Camerados and so we approached them to help with the idea for the work in Wigan.

Peoples Voice Media describe Ripple Effect Mapping as, a participatory impact evaluation technique. It originated in community development work and the method supports participants and other community stakeholders to reflect upon and visually map intended and unintended changes” occurring in a project or intervention (Chazdon et al, 2017: 2). In essence, the approach captures the ‘ripples’ of impact that a project or intervention makes. It “is concerned with the study of contribution; how may an intervention, action or policy contribute towards changing an outcome or a system?” (Nobles et al: 2022: 2).

Ripple Effect Mapping is a versatile impact measurement tool that makes use of the experiential knowledge and human insights from a project or intervention. It can be applied iteratively or conclusively – i.e. at various stages within a project or intervention, or at the end. Noble et al (2022) have utilised the approach in public health settings, Sadeghzadeh et al (2022) adopted the approach to assess the impact of a community garden project and Bloom (2021) applied it to a study on volunteering.’

Programme Overview

Keen to share the skills with members of the local community and the socially trading organisations we were working with we worked up a proposal with Peoples Voice Media.

The aim was to:

Support individuals, groups/projects and/or organisations in Wigan to use Ripple Effect Mapping to demonstrate the impact of their work.

With objectives of:

1. Enhancing people’s knowledge of Ripple Effect Mapping and how it can be used to demonstrate impact.

2.Supporting people to produce a Ripple Effect Map impact evaluation to document the impact of social change activities using lived experience.

3.Understand the impact of a series of projects/initiatives in Wigan. 

4.Developing people’s capacity to use lived experience via REM to support the development of local provision.

A four session applied learning capacity training programme with independent tasks was offered for up to 12 people.

Workshop One: Introduction to Ripple Effect Mapping – This session provided an overview of Ripple Effect Mapping as a method. Participants ‘had a go’ at a taster activity and started a Ripple Effect Map. Participants explored how to deliver a Ripple Effect Mapping session for their project/group/organisation.

Independent task: Participants were given 1 month to work with people connected to their project/group/organisation to do one or more Ripple Effect Maps.

Workshop Two: Analysing Ripple Effect Maps – This session provided participants with the skills to analyse their Ripple Effect Maps. It covered coding/categorising of the data and structures through which the impacts can be categorised.

Independent task: Participants were given 1 month to analyse their Ripple Effect Maps.

Workshop Three: Present your findings – This session provided participants with the skills to present their findings as written reports or in other more visual ways.

Independent task: Participants were given 1 month to ‘write-up/present’ their findings.

Workshop Four: At this workshop, the participants will present their results to their peers and participate in a learning exchange. From the workshop, a set of common impacts from across the work of the individual people/organisations/groups will be identified. This workshop was held live as part of the Northern Heart and Soul Learning Festival in May 2025.

We added additional peer support sessions, some together and some online and invited Mindful by Nature to host a nature based reflective session to sense make and reflect on the overall experience and learning from the experience of workshop four.

The Ripplers

Local people from the community of Springfield Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity were prioritised. We wanted to spread the skills so community members could be fully involved in co-hosting the Ripple Effect Mapping workshops in the local community in the self- organising clubs and groups they offer.  Northern Heart and Soul CiC and Springfield SBHG took up 6 of the places.

We invited groups and socially trading organisations we’d collaborated with, mainly through Grass Roots of Wigan and Wigan, Leigh and Makerfield Womens Network with one exception- the Community Health Building team at Groundwork.  Seven individuals / groups accepted the invitation and a a total of 11 people took part.

Northern Heart and Soul CiC and Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity

Springfield Beech Hill and Gildow CommUnity is a mutual aid group covering Wigan West that grew out of the pandemic and seeks to discover, connect and enable the community to support each other and act together as neighbours.  Northern Heart and Soul CiC was formed to hold contracts and risk to enable more neighbouring in the local place, and, to spread both the practice of Asset Based Community Development and community ownership.

Grass Roots of Wigan

Northern Heart and Soul CiC are founding members of Grass Roots of Wigan having sparked the network with resource from Power to Change, Necessity, Greater Manchester System Changers and Live Well. Grass Roots of Wigan is a 100 member unfunded and community-led network for people who want to make changes in the places where they live. It describes itself as an open network where there’s space to bounce ideas around, offer and receive mutual support, learn together and from each other and stand together in solidarity. They offer small sparks funds through circular and consensus decision making, seeking to spread the practice across neighbourhoods.

ReMade Wigan

Is a safe, supportive and creative space, run by women for women. They upcycle furniture and homewares in a woman safe workshop offering free and low cost workshops that support women to be confident, to feel like they belong and are valued, and to express their creativity in a purposeful way. ReMade is nurturing, inspiring and accessible, supported by volunteer mentors and visiting creatives. 

Alice of ReMade Wigan was a Director at Northern Heart and Soul CiC until summer 2025.  She had also been commissioned to grow the Make it Mine local womens community and NH&S had shared some Greater Manchester System Changer resource with ReMade and invited the organisation into the participatory grant making process as a Greater Manchester System Changer in their own right.

Mindful by Nature

Imelda started Mindful by Nature as it is her passion to improve the mental health and wellbeing of everyone by empowering people to develop their own knowledge, experience and skills by simply getting out of your head and into the woods. Northern Heart and Soul CiC met Imelda at Grass Roots of Wigan and decided to use some of their local funds to commission a Mindful Self Compassion programme for local women.

Let’s Shape Our Creativity

Let’s SHAPE Our Creativity CiC is a community interest company rooted in the belief that creativity can be a powerful tool for connection, healing, and self- expression. Based in Wigan, they provide free and low-cost arts and crafts sessions to improve mental health, reduce isolation, and bring people together in welcoming, inclusive spaces. Through painting, poetry, sculpture, and more, they empower individuals of all ages to explore their creativity, share their stories, and support one another. The work is shaped by lived experience and driven by a deep passion for community and well-being.

We met Emma of Let’s Shape our Creativity through ReMade and Grass Roots of Wigan and invited her to host art and creativity at CommUnity Corner in the Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity.  This relationship grew and Emma hosted a day a week at CommUnity Corner and currently holds a commission to support the Playbox design.

Vicky Galligan

We met Vicky through an open invitation to join a participatory budgeting group in Wigan.  She has been heavily involved in Shevington and District Community Association and is currently a ward councillor for the Labour Party. Vicky became a founding member of Grass Roots of Wigan through the participatory budgeting tester.

Complete Kindness CiC

Dionne of Complete Kindness describes herself as a community member who has a passion for improving lives. As a qualified psychotherapist she has some skills that help to support people and groups come together and feel safe enough to try new healthy practices and activities. We first came to know of Dionne via the community work she was overseeing in West Leigh.

Community Health Building at Groundwork

We invited the Community Health Building team at Groundwork to join us on the programme. They funded their own place. We knew Melissa had an interest in Ripple Effect Mapping and NH&S had long been trying to explore how we might share learning about the similarities and differences between the approach at West Leigh and Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow.  Another part of Melissas work – The Keep In Touch Brews (KITB) was selected for this action learning programme.

The Learning

Northern Heart and Soul CiC and Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity

It was clear that Northern Heart and Soul and Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity were privileged with greater resource (as in salaried people) in order to both participate in the project and try out the methodology. As a consequence they were able to support the collection of 30 maps by 35 people, offer local sense making sessions, write a report, create a visual poster thanks to Emma, offer an exhibition and create an online record on Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity website for the maps and stories. We were also able to offer people a £10 voucher as a thank you for giving up their time.

They learned the mutual aid aims and local mission is having a positive impact on individuals particularly impacting on wellbeing, confidence, self esteem and making and maintaining friendships. The invitation into community life appeared to enable personal and collective agency with people who completed maps finding their way into community life through neighbours, family and friends rather than professionals and referrals. It would appear that an invitation based on contribution may influence the way people felt able to contribute and move between participant, host, producer and paid worker.

You can read the full report here.

Grass Roots of Wigan

Grass Roots of Wigan hosted an online Ripple Effect Mapping workshop for members. It was an open invitation and nine members joined. Each member spent time producing a map and story, before spending time sharing their individual stories with each other. We built in time to make sense of the experience and learning together and a report was produced.

The rootedness in sharing resource was having an impact of the depth and width of collaborations that were growing. The emphasis on collaboration rather than competition was having a positive impact on mental health.

ReMade Wigan

Alice hosted a REM workshop with women who attend the ReMade workshop and you can see the Ripple Effect Maps below. They started by putting the workshop in the middle and talked a lot about the emotional impact and the ability to talk about anything without feeling judged. Learning new skills like the use of power tools had occurred and new friendships had led to more focus and better routines.   For some there had been a rediscovery of self and renewed confidence to stand up for their rights or leave harmful situations. In some cases the renewed confidence had led to people running their own workshops and the creation of three new enterprises  Allowing people to explore situations whilst feeling safe in a place where they can learn from each other and give and take had led to women feeling much more capable about dealing with situations in everyday life. 

Mindful by Nature

Imelda made Ripple Effect Maps with two of the women who take part in her Thursday evening sessions. She created a visual recording and you can listen to people talk about the ripples they experienced in the fellowship of the firepit.

Lets Shape Our Creativity

To capture the ripple effects of their work, LSoC invited workshop attendees to reflect on their personal experiences. Using a creative and collaborative mapping approach, individuals contributed written quotes, and keywords onto a central visual map. They managed to get feedback from 13 people and 9 ripple maps from others. One of the key learnings from the report, which you can download below is, ‘The mutual aid aspect—where participants support each other, learn from one another, and become change-makers themselves— demonstrates that with the right environment, people don’t just heal, they flourish and uplift those around them.’

Vicky Galligan

Vicky decided to use Ripple Effect Mapping to explore an issue that had come to light in a Facebook group that she administers – WN6 Mums. Women with young children were sharing feelings of isolation. Vicky organised a session using the ripple effect mapping training she’d experienced to begin to formulate plans and ideas that might help in the local area. Vicky presented her learning at the Learning Festival alongside her peers and reflected on the process and how she might be able to think about how women might self organise in peer groups as well as bringing services closer to local people.

Complete Kindness

Dionne made a Ripple Effect map with Friendly Faces, a group for older people. The group gives the attendees a regular opportunity to meet in person and form trusted relationships. The group offers everyone there a chance to take part in a range of activities and there is always a hot meal prepared. Everyone looks forward to going each week. Everyone there has found friendships, support, advice and kindness from each other. It is a wonderful place to be!

Dionne created a map, and also recorded a ripple conversation where she chatted with 6 members of the Friendly Faces group.

Companionship, friendship, bonding, happiness, connection and new experiences were common ripples, along with purpose, contribution and creating spaces filled with creativity and joy. These ingredients had impacted on group members well being. You can listen to the recording below.

Community Health Building at Groundwork

Melissa chose not to host a Ripple Effect Mapping workshop due to logistics. She created a survey which 25 people who attended Keep Connected Brews responded to, and then made sense of the results, creating both a visual summary and a report to present her findings which included:

KCBs positively impact individuals, organisations, and the wider system.

They support workforce development and system-wide learning.

Staff morale and wellbeing are improving, rippling into communities.

Trusted relationships are forming, enabling more effective collaboration.

You can download the visual and the report below.

Sense Making

It was clear to see, particularly across the work of Lets Shape Our Creativity, Springfield, Beech Hill and Gidlow CommUnity, ReMade Wigan, Complete Kindness and Mindful by Nature some common threads.

Peer support had led to improvements in health and well being and general every day living.

The conditions have enabled new friendships to form, confidence to grow and people to feel able to contribute. Forming new groups, hosting new groups, creating new businesses is common across the groups.

The conditions that enable peer support to thrive seem important and common to all. Open space with light holding and people connected through doing something they enjoy.

Creativity, nature and joy are common ingredients that are both valued and named across the board.

These conditions are not unique to community based groups and have also emerged as important to the Keep Connected Brews although the language may be different – the contribution to wellbeing of individuals and the friendships they are forming are the same.

Those same conditions have led to people feeling supported and nurtured in the collaborative community that is growing through Grass Roots of Wigan.

Reflections and Proposals

Not everyone could participate equally. We can see the difference quite clearly around what is possible when the work is resourced. And the work that was resourced by way of having people who earned a salary involved, required people to go above and beyond the day job to pull it all together. How do we build this into contracts, commissions in order to level the playing field?

Is it worth resourcing? When people are addicted to scale can they see the value of ripples?

When sufficiently resourced in a way that enables people to come together in groups to ripple effect map, using the methodology offered in the training, something deep happens at a personal and a community level. The ripple creates more ripples. This programme worked because of the commitment of the grass rooted organisations who wanted a way to demonstrate their work, and fully include the people who were experiencing it – a generative rather than an extractive process. Maybe a day will come that this will just be accepted, and we’ll just see resource flow in different ways.

Until then, we offer a caveat, as the risk is Ripple Effect Mapping becomes the next new shiny toy, and the world and his mother start to offer the approach.

The work requires properly resourcing with a community of practice so the real significant elements such as hosting, group mapping work and shared sense making are possible. It needs to stay rooted in communities, undertaken by and owned by communities themselves. We can hear the universities an academia shout out about bias from here. At the same time, external evaluators will never be able to surface the depth of experience that trusted people and peers can. Perhaps there’s a role for a critical friend to sit alongside the learning.

It also needs an audience, a place to speak, to share. A place committed to shifting power and resource, from what is to what might be. Beyond agendas and approaches. Shall we meet in the field?