Our Take on Your Community, Your Say, Your Solutions

At the Your Community, Your Say, Your Solutions event on the 21st of May in the neighbourhood north of Parsloes Park in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, project ideas were written up onto Dotmocracy sheets and voted on by participants. In Dotmocracy, a key principle is one idea per sheet. There were two ideas with united agreement, with one of them having united strong agreement. There was united strong agreement on the Festival of Culture idea and united agreement on the Teen Club idea indicating broad levels of support for those ideas.

There were quite a few ideas that had various levels of agreement and acceptance. Indicating that the ideas need to be further developed or that they have a specialist appeal. Ideas that fall into this grouping are:

• Weekend Social Club for special needs adults;
• Youth & Community Cafe;
• Anti-social behaviour hotline;
• Information Sharing Project;
• Day Care Centre for special needs adults.

Finally, there are the ideas with weak agreement and acceptance, which probably need to broaden their appeal and be clearer about their utility:

• Promoting Fanshawe Hall;
• Knitting & Crochetting Club;

On examining the ideas, 19 underlying themes were identified. These themes have a direct or indirect relationship to the ideas. For example, an idea may be about a Youth activity, but the nature of the activity is such that it requires a suitable venue, so in that case both Youth and Venues are the relevant themes. The themes (most frequent first) are as follows:

1. Venues
2. Local Information & Networks
3. Safety
4. Social Care
5. Community & Neighbours
6. Special Needs
7. Support
8. Arts & Crafts
9. Youth
10. Elderly
11. Skills & Training
12. Intergenerational
13. Children
14. Employment & Jobs
15. Health & Wellbeing
16. Enterprise
17. Food
18. Public Services
19. Crime & Antisocial Behaviour

To enable the potential for effective community action, key pieces of infrastructure need to be available. This is reflected in the top two themes. In order to meet, take part in activities and receive/provide services, there needs to be physical places where people can gather & make things happen. These needn't be dedicated "community centres" in the now established sense, hence Venues rather than Community Centres as the theme name. Venues was the most heavily represented theme reflecting the fact that a lot of the ideas will need a venue to be hosted at. One question that people often have is "how do we find out what's going on?" There may be meetings, activities and services locally that are relevant to them, buf if they don't know about them, they can't take part in what's happening or make use of available services. Furthermore, the community groups and local organisations organizing meetings, activities and providing services, need to better coordinate, collaborate and pool resources in the post-Cuts environment as well as promote themselves to the community at large. This all gives rise to the Local Information & Networks theme for the various ways of connecting people with information and other people.

The themes Safety and Social Care arises from the need for places where adults with special needs, children & young people can go and take part in activities happily and safely. Speaking of Special Needs, there is a clear desire to provide for people who have them, especially adults with learning difficulties. Likewise, there is also an express interest in providing for Children & Youth, especially via a Teen Club. There is a lot less clarity about what else could be done for Youth, but a clear desire.

The Community & Neighbours theme is about bringing people together. There is a clear and present need to increase the levels of bridging social capital in this locality. There is also an underlying theme about groups and organisations needing Support from each other. Another manifestation of the need for more bridging social capital. Various ideas related to clubs & cafes are clearly relevant here as well as the Festival of Culture event.

Arts and Crafts are one way of bringing people together and also can have therapeutic benefits in its own right. This is reflected by ideas like the Festival of Culture and the Knitting & Crochetting Club.

A lot of the project ideas don't need that much money relatively speaking, just sufficient coordination and facilitation to get and keep them going. There is also a lot of potential for the various ideas to support each other as they become projects, again that relies on the coordination & facilitation. So a focus on Local Information & Networks would be strategic.