Digital Together

Community Digital Hubs

Project title: Digital Together

Funded by: Shared Prosperity Fund (Cornwall Council Good Growth)

Duration: April 2023 – March 2025

Location: Cornwall

Project partners: Cornwall Rural Community Charity, University of Plymouth, University of Exeter, Cornwall Council, Citizens Advice, Age UK

University of Plymouth staff: Professor Katharine Willis , Miss Alexandra Carr

Digital Together has worked closely with community hubs to embed digital skills and access to support across Cornwall, with collective aims of improving health and wellbeing – by understanding that digital can be a significant tool in supporting wellbeing and reducing delivery costs for health and social care.

The Digital Community Hubs project has been delivered by the University of Plymouth as part of the Digital Together partnership of public sector, university and charity partners. It has five distinct innovative projects and was funded by Shared Prosperity and CIOS Good Growth Fund between 2023 and 2024. Digital Together's partners have also included the Cornwall Rural Community Charity, Cornwall Council, University of Exeter, and Citizens Advice.

Our aims

Set up 10 hubs in village halls and community centres through a co-design approach, equipping the hubs with a digital library toolkit of technology including computers, 3D printers and VR devices that can be used by the community to empower them to develop their own projects and skillsets.
Through the co-design approach, create and run a digital hub roadshow for the community to come together to discuss what they want from the hubs and what local place-based challenges they want to address (e.g., sustainability, health).
Support 25 micro-entrepreneurial projects to get started and demonstrate what creative digital inclusion can be local as a way to communicate ‘through doing’.
Work with community hubs, building the capacity of voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) staff to leverage the power of digital by looking at the feasibility of using a range of digital technologies to monitor vulnerable residents and increase wellbeing.

Outcomes and impact

Leveraged the ability of community hubs to further support their communities and improve prevention level interventions
Supported rural communities to design their own digital solutions to their local challenges
Increased the digital capacity of community facilities and community groups, with improved civic participation
Increased access to digital devices and improved connectivity
Created a Digital Skills ecosystem with digital champions and micro entrepreneurs (skills and employability)
Strengthened the social fabric (pride in place)

Throughout the Digital Together project, we have worked to grant-fund and support the creation and development of 16 digital hubs and micro-entrepreneurial creative digital projects across Cornwall. This has included working with a diverse range of groups, from rural village halls to social enterprises and cultural spaces.

Our work with community hubs has included co-design activity to support and empower community to consider how technology can support them to tackle local place-based challenges and develop their own creative digital projects. The communities we have worked with have developed ideas and projects that cover a range of topics related to digital technology, creativity and the unique characteristics of their place. Varying in focus from heritage, health, biodiversity and landscape to wellbeing, the communities have used a range of digital tools including 3D printing, virtual reality, filmmaking software, citizen science apps, and many more.

16 Digital Hubs in village halls, community centres and CIC businesses. Equipping the hubs with a digital device library, including tablets, computers, 3D printers and VR devices. Used to empower community members to develop their own creative digital projects and skillsets.

16 micro-entrepreneurial grants that have facilitated the creation of a diverse range of creative digital projects that address locally identified challenges within communities. Demonstrating how creative digital inclusion can be locally meaningful and effective.

A Creative Digital Hubs toolkit to share learning and case studies from the project. Providing a resource for other community groups and organisations to explore the opportunities of collaboratively developed digital projects.

Project case studies

Digital Together project - digital bioblitz

Newquay Orchard is a social enterprise focused on connecting local people with nature through biodiversity education, environmental programs, and wellbeing initiatives. To enhance their work through Digital Together, Newquay Orchard partnered with Pollenize CIC to deliver a Bioblitz survey within their green spaces. They aim to raise awareness about pollinators and their habitats while promoting community involvement.

By using citizen science apps, participants digitally record observations of pollinators, such as insects and plants. This data helps identify missing species, guiding Pollenize in creating plant sowing plans to support biodiversity. In addition to the surveys, Newquay Orchard integrated digital skills through 3D printing workshops. Young people designed and printed solitary bee homes from recycled plastics, blending environmental education with digital learning.

Godolphin Cross is a rural community in West Cornwall. In response to closures of local amenities, the Godolphin Cross Community Association (GCCA) transformed the Old Chapel into a multi-use space, offering youth and adult programmes and arts and heritage initiatives focused on local mining and history.

GCCA aimed to combine the community’s passion for heritage with digital tools to create accessible experiences for residents unable to attend in-person events due to health or mobility challenges. With support from Digital Together, they established a Digital Hub and run workshops with their over 50s Reach Out group.

Using 360 cameras, LiDAR scanning and specialist equipment from the University’s Digital Fabrication and Immersive Media Laboratories , they recorded history tours and landscapes. These immersive videos can be experienced online or via virtual reality headsets, helping bring the community closer to its heritage while building digital literacy and inclusivity.

Imagine If run Health and Wellbeing Hubs across Cornwall, supporting individuals manage their health, reduce isolation, and enhance social connections. Rural and geographically isolated communities face distinct barriers to health services including digital exclusion. Farming communities, even more so, can experience heightened social isolation, unconventional working hours, and limited digital literacy, making them less likely to engage with conventional wellbeing and support services.

To address this, Imagine If launched a Farming Health Hub – meeting farmers at markets and agricultural shows, they used tablet surveys to start conversations and begin to build trust and promote their services.

By rethinking their outreach strategies to engage with a traditionally hard-to-reach demographic, they met farmers on their own terms, promoted digital literacy and connected them to health and wellbeing resources, including access to community nurses and digital skill-building workshops.

St Breward Memorial Hall, a community hub and digital venue on Bodmin Moor, has long provided digital skills support. Among its users, the St Breward History Group has built a rich physical archive of oral histories, artefacts, and photographs documenting the area’s heritage. The archive was largely inaccessible, stored in cabinets with only a limited online presence. The challenge was to use digital tools to make local history more engaging and available to a wider audience.

With support from the Digital Together project, the group explored 3D scanning, collaborative mapping, and digital storytelling. Through workshops, they identified priorities for digitisation and developed an interactive walking route and map using cameras, 3D scanning, and website building tools. This allowed users to access archival materials, historical narratives, and site-specific media via digital pinpoints, transforming the archive into a dynamic community resource.

Discovering 42 is a science museum based in Bodmin that uses art and hands-on interactive exhibits as a catalyst to bring physics, chemistry, engineering, and environmental issues to life. Their exhibitions are constantly evolving and crafted from upcycled materials and objects. They create an environment for informal learning that enables visitors to become engaged in subjects they might not normally find interesting, making science relevant and approachable, creating a space to experiment and inspiring us all to feel we can contribute.

Through the Digital Together project, Discovering 42 is creating a Digital Hub and supportive environment where young people aged 10–15 can channel their energy into digital creativity projects. This builds on their existing Demystifying Digital workshops by integrating activities that use 3D printing and laser cutting, supporting the community interest in digital skills, reuse, and creativity.

Underpinning research: place-based digital inclusion

The research is underpinned by a series of projects that look at place-based digital inclusion. The research identified that digital inclusion in rural contexts were highly dependent on ‘place’, and require a ‘place’ (such as a community centre, library or village hall), a set of people to create social networks, and access to equipment and connectivity.

The Digital Venue Toolkit was a key output of the project and was developed as best practice for digital inclusion in rural villages.

Download the Toolkit

Digital Neighbourhoods

The four-year EU-funded Digital Neighbourhoods (Local Inclusion in Networked Communities) Research Project (2013–2017) partnered with Superfast Cornwall. In collaboration with Cornwall Rural Community Charity (CRCC) and Cornwall Council, the research evidenced how access to high-speed broadband affects rural places and piloted an approach aimed at overcoming digital divides.

The project was featured as best practice by the European Network for Rural Development (ENRD) in two policy briefs as part of The EU Smart Villages programme. This identified digitisation strategies in Cornwall and highlighted that Cornwall has excellent potential to be a leader in rural digitisation.

The Greenhouse: a community digital engagement space

The Greenhouse , which acts as a creative technology hub for local organisations and residents, provides technological and digital support through a neighbourhood-based drop-in centre. The project is a partnership with Nudge Community Builders communit and is based in the Plot, a community space in Stonehouse. The Greenhouse is a place where people can experience and play with technology in a way that supports them to learn how it could benefit them.

This includes students working in the community, running workshops, events and one-to-one support for local people and aims to encourage local and sustainable thinking, providing a stimulus for local entrepreneurship.

Key publications

Willis, KS, (2017) Digital Venue Toolkit

Willis, KS, (2019) Making a 'Place' for ICTs in Rural Communities: The role of village halls in digital inclusion. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities (C&T '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 136–142.

Digital together co-design process

Digital Together is a community asset-based approach to tackling digital exclusion that goes beyond providing access to skills training.

We want to support communities to embed digital as a tool to achieve their collective aims towards building sustainable communities, building social and digital capital that increases wellbeing and a sense of belonging by co-designing how local digital infrastructure works for them.

We have worked with individuals, groups and communities to improve skills, access to technology and information, advice and guidance to improve capacity to engage in digital services, civil society, health, education, training and employment opportunities.

Embedded in our activities has been co-designing projects with communities. We have delivered community engagement events and co-design workshops that are focused on increasing the capacity of places to leverage the opportunities of digital to improve the social fabric of place.

To do so, we have focused on increasing the skills and knowledge of individuals and community assets/groups and improving the digital infrastructure of a place.

By improving digital and social capital, we have supported leaders in communities to meet the community's identified needs and increase aspiration and connection.

Digital Together aligns closely with the Community and Place objectives of the Shared Prosperity Fund:

Strengthening our social fabric and fostering a sense of local pride and belonging, through investment in activities that enhance physical, cultural and social ties and amenities, such as community infrastructure and local green space, and community-led projects.
Building resilient, safe and healthy neighbourhoods through investment in quality places that people want to live, work, play and learn in; through targeted improvement to the built environment and innovative approaches to crime prevention.