What is the Value of Community Connectedness and How Can We Measure It?

Chris Dayson 28.05.2026

An aerial view of a Welsh community, with rows of terraced houses stretching across a hillside.

Aerial view of a Welsh community. Image Credit: Delyth Williams via Pexels

What is the value of community connectedness and the social infrastructure that enables it?

It’s a question that researchers and community leaders get asked a lot, particularly by policymakers looking to develop business cases to justify strategic investment in community assets and activities. But what do we actually mean when we talk about value, and do we even agree? And even if can agree about what value is can we find a way to measure it? This question has been at the heart debates in economics and sociology for hundreds of years.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith didn’t agree about much (well, actually, they agreed about more than you might think, but that’s a blog for another day), but they did share some views about value. Key amongst these was the idea that there are essentially two types of value that drive how economies function: use value and exchange value. Exchange value is what something is ‘worth’ in exchange (typically price). It tends to be expressed quantitatively, is easily comparable, and realised in markets or accounting systems. Use value is the utility, meaning, or usefulness of something. By contrast it tends to qualitative, contextual, experiential, relational, and realised in use (i.e. what it does for someone). However, problems can arise because things that are useful but not easily expressed in monetary terms tend to be undervalued, whereas things that are profitable but not socially beneficial tend to be overvalued. This tension was fundamental to Marx’s critique of capitalism and led him to suggest that capitalist systems will always privilege exchange value over use value.

But what does this have to do with community connectedness, you might ask?

Put simply, community connectedness is the perfect example of something where use value is likely to exceed or be more obvious than exchange value. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have financial benefits for the economy or the public sector, it almost certainly does. It’s just that the use value – non-financial benefits such as improved wellbeing or social capital – is likely to be more important to those who actually matter: people and communities experiencing social connection on a daily basis. For researchers and community leaders this presents a conundrum: how do we demonstrate the value of activities that improve community connection in ways that are useful to policymakers but also, importantly, meaningfully reflect the experiences of people in the communities we are working with? I call this a ‘value problem’ and finding ways to overcome it has been a focus of my research for the past 15 years or so.

Now for the good news.

We do actually have some tools that we can use to demonstrate the value of community activities that capture exchange and use value in one go. One of these tools is called the WELLBY (Wellbeing Life Year). In the UK the WELLBY is recommended by HM Treasury in its Green Book guidance as its preferred measure of social value for assessing progress towards the wellbeing component of the economy and steering policy decisions towards activities that create the most wellbeing possible. Using some complex econometric calculations, the WELLBY converts gains in wellbeing into a monetary figure by comparing them to gains in household income. One WELLBY is said by HM Treasury to be worth around £15,000 per person, per year.

The WELLBY approach is gaining credibility in the UK as an evaluations measure for policies and interventions where wellbeing is seen as an important outcome. In our recent publication in People, Place and Policy Online we share the findings and some critical reflections from our research using the WELLBY approach to evaluate the social value of Defra’s national Green Social Prescribing (GSP) programme. GSP supports community connectedness by providing opportunities for people to access community-based activities in nature. Our evaluation found that connecting people to community activities through GSP can lead to significant wellbeing benefits for people experiencing mental ill-health, with a social return on investment (SROI) of between £2.38-£5.90.

Does this mean that WELLBY could be used more widely to show the exchange and use value of community connectedness?

Possibly, but we also caution that the WELLBY approach should not be used uncritically. There are lots of methodological challenges with using these types of measures within communities plus, and despite the HM Treasury Green Book guidance, the findings didn’t get as much traction will national policy makers as we had hoped. Even more importantly though, we suggest that there is a need to think very carefully about whether or not such a simple and one-dimensional measure could actually mask more value than it promotes. It doesn’t tell us anything about individual experiences, outcomes and attributes, or how participants from different backgrounds may experience community connection and wellbeing differently. Evidence is not a zero-sum game, so when researching the value of community connectedness, we need a range of methods in our toolbox – quantitative and qualitative, economic and experiential – and ensure that these are given parity of esteem when it comes to making policy decisions.

You can read our article here:

Dayson C., Willson, I., Leather, D., Foster, A., Jaques, R., Haywood, A., Garside, R., Harris, C., Hunt, H., Holding, E., Husk, K., Lovell, R., Shearn, K., Dobson, J., & Thompson, J. (2026). Using WELLBYs to demonstrate the social value of social prescribing at a national level: evidence from Green Social Prescribing in England. People, Place and Policy, 20(1), pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.3351/ppp.2026.3524966557

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