Wellspring Settlement

Wellspring Settlement is a community anchor charity established in 2020 through the merger of Wellspring Healthy Living Centre and Barton Hill Settlement, longstanding institutions in inner-city east Bristol. Its mission is to build strong, dynamic communities and enhance quality of life for residents, particularly in Barton Hill, by enabling happier, healthier lives through inclusive, community-led support that addresses health and social inequalities. Rooted in values of empowerment, inclusion, partnership, responsiveness, and sustainability, it adopts a distinctive hub model—hosting direct services, co-delivering with partners like NHS, charities, and grassroots groups, and fostering co-production where local residents shape solutions for holistic wellbeing.

It prioritises thematic areas including health and wellbeing (mental health, community food, healthy lifestyles), children and family support, employability and skills, digital and financial inclusion, and community engagement for social cohesion. Funding supports community-led initiatives tackling disadvantage for low-income families, ethnically diverse groups, and marginalised residents, such as food clubs, family learning, youth programmes, mental health partnerships, and employability schemes, emphasising outcomes like reduced inequalities, stronger connections, and local leadership.

Eligible entities are small, grassroots community groups and social enterprises with strong resident involvement and incomes typically below £250,000, operating exclusively in hyper-local Barton Hill, Lawrence Hill, and surrounding east Bristol neighbourhoods. It does not accept unsolicited applications or run open grant rounds; opportunities arise via invited partnerships, commissioned work, or hub collaborations, offering discretionary partnership funding, seed support, core costs, resource-sharing, and facilitation on a rolling basis with no fixed deadlines or published grant ranges.

Distinctively, Wellspring eschews narrow project grants for sustained, collaborative community development, excluding non-local or non-aligned work, and stands out for its facilitative leadership in high-need urban areas, centring seldom-heard voices and participatory models to maximise neighbourhood impact.