Archive

Government urged to extend Pathfinder

19 May 2005

A dossier published this week by the National Housing Federation urges the Government to extend the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder to the whole of England. Work With Us for Better Neighbourhoods is available via www.regen.net/doc.

Liverpool culture organisation to share funding

7 April 2005

Pathfinder bosses to meet programme's critics

23 June 2005

A private summit is being convened in east Lancashire in the wake of virulent press criticism of the Government's housing market renewal programme, Regeneration & Renewal can reveal.

Local leaders make the link with schools

23 June 2005

Q: What is innovative about your scheme? A: It's innovative because the NCSL has turned the idea of the relationship between schools and communities on its head. Instead of working with schools to reach out to communities, the scheme supports the community to reach into schools. Developing leadership capacity in the community to engage with schools recognises it's not a one-way relationship. There are four training modules - a total of eight days spaced out over up to four months. The training runs in parallel to the projects so participants can return periodically to review their progress. One of the novel things about this is that participants are able to immediately apply the new techniques they are learning to their partnerships. Q: What kind of partnerships develop and what do they aim to achieve? A: The main aim of the partnerships is to be mutually beneficial to both the community and the school. One participant worked with a school to refurbish a bandstand in a neighbouring park. Another worked to set up an advisory centre in the school grounds that offers services such as a credit union and a sexual health clinic to members both of the school and the community. Q: What happens to the partnership once the project comes to an end? A: We run a two-day conference as the fourth module at the end of the programme to identify how the partners want to take the partnership forward. Participants can invite three people to the event. One of these has to be from the school, but the other two can be whoever the participant feels is most appropriate to keep the partnership going. Some have kept going, others have run their course and finished as we'd planned, some haven't been successful. It's always frustrating when this happens, but we still learn a lot. Q: What wider application does this programme have beyond the pilots? A: The NCSL has funding to run a second and third round of pilots. What it hopes to do is capture some of the learning from this process as the basis for a national roll-out. The form of this isn't clear yet, but critically every participant in the first round has continued to work with children, so we feel the techniques used in the programme have a wider application. We've come up with a very innovative way of developing community leadership that would work anywhere in the country. THE PANEL: Questions were compiled with help from Beth Longstaff, information officer at the Community Development Exchange, and Sarah Benioff, chief executive of the Community Development Foundation. - Contact us If you know of an innovative scheme that merits closer scrutiny, contact Shafik Meghji at shafik.meghji@haynet.com.

An inquiry into how charities think the public perceives them ...

28 April 2005

Manifesto pushes community land ownership

31 March 2005

The manifesto, published this week, says that by "locking in" land value, community ownership can enable community involvement in planning decisions and prevent local people and businesses being priced out of an area.

Altering the terms of social enterprise

24 November 2005

Senscot is an acronym for Social Entrepreneurs Network Scotland, which is my day job. Unavoidably, I get drawn into discussions about who is and is not a social entrepreneur (groan). My view is that we should keep it vague. Sigmund Freud didn't say that the human psyche comprises an ego, an id and a superego. He said it may be useful to think 'as if' it is so. Still, today's psychologists mean different things by these terms. Similarly it may be useful to think 'as if' there is a group of people whose behaviour is sufficiently alike to categorise them as social entrepreneurs (SEs). But this term should be considered descriptive not prescriptive. Things like formal charitable status are different. If there are fiscal benefits, a precise definition is appropriate, but SE is just a new term for those generous individuals who have always existed and who are motivated to make the world better.

What's On - Regeneration-related TV and radio

24 November 2005

Friday 25 November; 7.30pm - How to Rescue a House. BBC2. Eddie McIntosh needs to move to Grantham in Lincolnshire, but he can only afford to buy a derelict home.

Diary

24 November 2005

A public policy fable of the Aesop vintage comes this week from the Creative Industries conference in London, where Workspace Group chief executive Harry Platt warned public sector officials to ensure that their ideas for business were intelligent, helpful - and safe from harm from hippos.

Work Experience - Bob Holman, voluntary community worker, Glasgow

24 November 2005

Bob Holman, 69, has volunteered on Glasgow's Easterhouse estate, where he lives, since 1986. Now retired, he has been a social worker and a professor of social policy, and has set up community projects on housing estates, run youth clubs and written about poverty.