About Here / Now / Today Ltd
We build around the gaps between people and the things that could help.
What began with movement and creativity has grown into a connected family of projects spanning wellbeing, community discovery, local media, research and digital development. The format changes. The underlying job does not.
The origin
It started in a room.
Here / Now began with a simple observation: a lot of wellbeing and fitness spaces are easiest to enter when you already feel confident, capable and comfortable in them. We wanted to build from the other direction.
The early work centred on movement, music, creativity and community. Vibe Dance Fitness became the clearest expression of that approach: fun-first, adaptable and deliberately low-pressure.
Then the same pattern kept appearing elsewhere. People struggled to find local groups. Positive community stories were drowned out by the usual churn. Small organisations needed better digital systems. We were collecting useful data but needed a more rigorous way to learn from it. So the work expanded, not as a pile of side-projects, but as different answers to the same access problem.
The common thread
Make participation easier. Make useful things visible. Learn enough to make the next version better.
What sits under Here / Now
A parent organisation with five active strands.
Each has its own audience, identity and product. Here / Now carries the shared values, infrastructure and learning between them.
01
Vibe Dance Fitness
Accessible movement, community and online learning built around choice, confidence and enjoyment.
02
The Tees
Constructive local journalism, events and community stories from across Tees Valley.
03
CommuniTees
A public directory helping people find groups, services, spaces and opportunities near them.
04
Studies & Data
Participant-centred research and evaluation designed to turn real-world practice into inspectable learning.
05
DigitalDev
Websites, apps and systems for purpose-led organisations and growing businesses.
Public benefit
The philanthropic instinct is practical.
We are interested in work that leaves useful things behind: stronger access, better information, more confidence, more connection, better evidence or a piece of infrastructure another person can use.
Here / Now / Today Ltd is an independent company rather than a registered charity. We use “social impact” and “public benefit” to describe the purpose of this work without blurring that distinction.
Access
Designing participation so fewer people are excluded by confidence, cost, confusing systems or lack of information.
Connection
Creating more routes into local community, shared activity and a sense of belonging.
Learning
Turning observations and participant experience into research questions, data and transparent reporting.
Infrastructure
Building digital tools that make useful work easier to discover, deliver and sustain.
Evidence matters to us.
We want to know whether something appears to help, how people experience it and what we still do not know. That means collecting less data, but better data, and being clear about its limits.
Current learning
Vibe: 66 anonymous before-and-after check-ins
The first learning paper reports an encouraging immediate pattern across mood, belonging and motivation while also spelling out the limitations of the current dataset and the next methodological improvements required.
In development
Campfire: Connection, Regulation & Movement
A structured pilot exploring a screen-free, low-pressure movement environment and its relationship with mental noise, tension, body connection, confidence and social connection.
Privacy by design
Transparent methods
Limitations included
How we try to work
A few rules we keep returning to.
People before systems
We start with the person trying to take part, find something, understand something or get something done. The system has to bend before the person does.
Make useful things findable
A brilliant service is not useful if nobody knows it exists. Discovery, clear information and low-friction access are part of the intervention.
Learn from what happens
We collect data because we want to understand the work, not decorate it. We publish limitations and treat early findings as evidence to investigate, not proof to overclaim.
Creativity belongs in serious work
Movement, media, design, technology and play can all carry serious social value. We do not flatten useful ideas to make them look more conventional.