Our history
From local roots to citywide impact
2000
Creation
TDC was founded as an independent project in the year 2000 – the same year that Brighton & Hove gained City status.
TDC was created to spread the community development model across the city of Brighton & Hove and beyond, with its roots going back to 40 years of the Hangleton & Knoll Project, the neighbourhood community development charity, which helped set up TDC, until it we were able to employ our first staff and become a registered charity in 2004.
2003
Neighbourhood
TDC’s first significant work was delivering community development directly in neighbourhoods experiencing deprivation in Brighton and Hove, which has remained our prime focus. This included training a generation of community development workers for the city, many of whom still work with TDC and our partners.
Early growth was funded by a mix of delivering local statutory contracts supplemented by self-generated consultancy income.
2010
Youth & Equalities
Through the 2010s Youth work and Equalities work developed as additional areas of organisational expertise. Our youth work began as delivering youth clubs in areas of the city with high levels of deprivation and has since expanded to include outreach work and individual support.
Our Equalities work began with community engagement with ethnically diverse communities and has expanded to include social prescribing, health and wellbeing work, employability support and community learning with a broad range of excluded communities.
By 2018 TDC had grown to a turnover of £650k and a staff team of 20.
2018
“Community Led Solutions to Tackling Inequality” was TDC’s organisational strategy 2018-2022, which laid the path ‘to become a healthy and sustainable organisation delivering a dynamic programme of radical community led solutions that reduces the unacceptable inequality in Brighton and Hove’.
Despite the sudden onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020, which had such a profound impact on day-to-day life as well as to the delivery and operations of TDC, our role as a trusted conduit between excluded communities and statutory services became ever more significant.
During this period TDC trebled in size, and greatly increased the breadth and depth of our work, gaining ‘Lead Partner’ status for much of our delivery in the city.
