In Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care (2015) Ambition 6 states that the aspiration is that ‘Each community is prepared to help’. The range of terms used to describe this approach are based on the principle that care at the end of life should be done with people and not to people, that death, dying, loss and care are complex social events, in which the medical component is only one aspect.

This paper outlines the outputs and future considerations from a series of workshops that took an Appreciative Inquiry Model (Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design, Delivery onto Destiny) approach to design, test and produce a local community development workshop ‘toolkit’ for anyone, not just professionals to use. The project, led by Hospice UK and commissioned by NHS England, resulted in a free online resource, a community of practice network (Source4Network) with a discussion site and a twitter community @ComDevCoP.

The co-design group for the work brought together hospices that had already begun their development journey as community engagers. The work further substantiated that each community has unique challenges and idiosyncrasies, the resulting toolkit reflecting a flexible locality driven approach with the intent to increase the connectivity across sectors, communities, neighbourhoods and social networks.

The co-design group of community engagers launched the tested tool kit in July 2019. It provides local communities an opportunity to harness the support of local interested members to provide improved community support for carers, those at the end of lives, going through a bereavement and/or lonely. The evaluation is ongoing and initial findings will be available by the Hospice UK conference in November 2019.

Acknowledgements to the hospices that supported the process are within the Hospice UK website page and community development toolkit.