EVC May event: ASAN and the Community-based research project
Posted by Andrew Brightwell on 17th May 2010Live notes from the Making Community Strategies work for Communities event. May 17th 2010. Bournville Birmingham:
Christine
Iftikar Karim and Mike Swain work for the All Saints Action Network in Wolverhampton, which was delivering the Community Based Research Project.
Mike said it was a matter of doing what they did best and engaging with people who they knew were already in touch with their communities. They worked with community-based practitioners to identify issues that affect their communities and to provide them with tailored training and support that would help them to tackle these issues more effectively. The hope was to ensure their work in the future would become more sustainable. Like other EVCP projects, they hoped to improve the NI4 (National indicator 4 measures the per centage of people who feel they can influence decisions in their locality) scores in the West Midlands. This government indicator measures the ‘percentage of people who feel they can influence decisions in their locality’.
The ASAN team worked in eight different locations across the West Midlands: Walsall, Stoke, Staffordshire, Sandwell, Coventry, Warwickshire, Birmingham and Hereford.They were involved in a wide range of different projects, including helping to involve a local community in the design of a new community building and recreation area for a family centre at Norton Hall in Birmingham, and helping a group in Walsall to make their activities more effective.
Mike presented the Stoke On Trent project ASAN helped with as a case study. Here the ASAN team helped a local community to engage with the local council to try to secure a new asset for them.
Christine Pratt – Blurton Community Steering Group - introduced her grassroots project to take on their new building, where Mike from ASAN was able to provide invaluable advice to their project as they develop a community-asset transfer deal to take over the building.
‘Mike was firm but fair, the neutral person among us. He also told us occasionally that we needed to bang heads together.’ She said it helped to give their business plan the direction that it needed.
ASAN identified a number of key lessons learned from their work. These included:
- The importance of establishing a network, including resident and other local groups, organisational trustees and religious leaders.
- ASAN had great success with ‘seeing is believing’ tours, to show communities what other groups had been able to do.
- Encouraging practitioners to confront issues they’d been reluctant to take on was particularly effective, because it helped them to appreciate their abilities and understand how to use them.
- The projects enabled service users and providers to challenge each other about the way that local projects have been approached and developed.
Mike said that it’s important to get things with these kinds of projects out in the open and that sometimes there have been tense situations, but people have to be able to say what they feel. Finally, he said, people must have the information they require to develop these projects.
After the presentation we grabbed a quick chat with Christine:
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/05/Christine-EVCWM-.mp3[/podcast]
We spoke to Iftikar about the project in March, where he talked about the project’s aims, a little about its project at Norton Hall in Birmingham and how the project could be improved if it was to be run again. You can find the interview here, or below: