Harnessing Innovations in Community Response and Intersectoral Collaboration for Health and Food Justice Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Building Back Better from Below project aims to understand social innovations and cross-sector collaborations that developed during the Covid-19 pandemic in an attempt to transform long-standing inequities in health, access to food and governance structures.

The project has taken place across São Paulo (Brazil), Toronto (Canada) and Brighton & Hove (UK). The evidence being captured from this project has the potential to underpin further action to address inequities in Brazil, Canada, the UK and beyond.

Background

The Covid-19 pandemic deepened existing social, health and nutritional inequities and highlighted common challenges facing marginalised and racialised communities in cities across the Global North and South. It also drove new social innovations and cross-sector collaborations, some of which have the potential to transform the longstanding inequities that undermine global health, food systems and governance processes.

This project has been documenting, analysing and drawing wider lessons from the collaborations that have emerged in three socially diverse and economically dynamic but unequal cities: São Paulo (Brazil), Toronto (Canada) and Brighton & Hove (UK). Some of these lessons were shared with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting MP, at a round-table on learning from international experience for the NHS 10-Year Plan that was jointly organised by IDS and King’s College London in March 2025.

IDS researchers and local partners in the City of Brighton & Hove have been working with teams led by the University of Toronto Scarborough, School of Cities and Dalla Lana School of Public Health  in Toronto, and The Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo da Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV EAESP) in São Paulo on this collaborative initiative, which is funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform.

The project combines insights from social science research and the lived experiences of activists, social entrepreneurs, front-line workers and local public officials to identify strategies for future action to disrupt entrenched patterns of inequity and secure health rights and food justice after the pandemic.

Recognising the intersecting nature of the health, food equity and democratic representation challenges the pandemic has brought, we have taken an action research approach to analysing the trajectories, outcomes and sustainability of grassroots innovations and collaborations that have emerged since March 2020 among activists and front-line service providers working with marginalised and racialised communities in the three cities.

Thematic workstreams have been examining innovative local initiatives to ensure access to primary health care, emergency food provision and political representation of the needs and priorities of marginalised communities disproportionately burdened by Covid-19. They have analysed the social, political, institutional and policy factors that have enabled or hindered effective collaboration and co-production of programmes and services between citizens and public authorities, between different levels of government and between state, community and business actors.

Synthesis work is examining the outcomes and sustainability of the experiences of cross-sector policy coordination and multi-stakeholder collaboration that have emerged in the three cities during the pandemic. This work aims to assess the potential of evidence from these experiences to underpin strategic and scaled-up action to tackle intersecting inequities affecting marginalised and racialised communities in Brazil, Canada, the UK and beyond.

In Brighton and Hove, the following organisations are working as project collaborative partners:

• Bridging Change
• Brighton & Hove City Council, Public Health Department
• Sussex Health and Care
• Brighton & Hove Food Partnership