BreathChamps was built on a simple idea: communities already have many of the things they need to create better health and wellbeing.

Too often, health services start with what is wrong with people – their illness, their limitations, their problems or what they cannot do. An asset-based approach starts somewhere different. It asks “What is strong here? Who is already doing something brilliant? What skills, relationships, places and ideas can we build on?”

This was at the heart of everything we did at BreathChamps.

We didn't want to build a large organisation that delivered everything itself. Instead, we looked for the people and organisations already doing good things in their communities and asked what we could achieve together.

Sometimes that meant bringing a health perspective to an existing community activity. Sometimes it meant finding a musician, dancer, artist, environmental group or community organisation and helping them adapt what they already did so that people living with health conditions could take part.

And sometimes it meant testing an idea ourselves, proving that it worked, and then handing it over to others so that it could grow beyond BreathChamps.

This is why partnership was so important to us. The real asset was never BreathChamps. It was the people, skills, creativity, relationships and community connections around us:

• Brownies that used 'pester power' to share knowledge about asthma

• Singing leaders who realised that they could help people with lung disease

• Libraries that told stories about how children could help The Big Bad Wolf to take the right inhaler in the .

Our work was about connecting those assets with people who might otherwise be excluded – particularly people living with breathing conditions – and creating opportunities for them to do more of what makes us healthy: connect, contribute, move, learn, create, spend time in nature and belong.

That philosophy is rooted in the asset-based and salutogenic approaches to health that our founder Heather Henry has written about throughout her nursing career – moving the focus from fixing illness towards creating health.

Building something that lasts

For us, successful partnership was never about making BreathChamps indispensable.

It was about making ourselves less necessary.

We wanted to leave something behind that communities could own and continue. That is why, as BreathChamps closes, so many of our activities are being taken forward by the organisations and people we worked alongside.

The logos below represent just some of the fabulous people and organisations who helped make BreathChamps possible.

We didn't do it for communities. We did it with communities.

And that is the legacy we are most proud of.