The National Empowerment Partnership (NEP) works to improve peoples’ ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives. It’s a process that we call community empowerment. The NEP gathers evidence of effective community empowerment and promotes the powerful benefits of involving communities in the decisions that affect them.

The Every Voice Counts Partnership is a Regional Empowerment Partner (REP). It’s our job to make sure the NEP’s national objectives are met in the West Midlands. That means we deliver the NEP’s regional funding to the people who can do the most to benefit local decision making and, in turn, change the way things work for the better.

Our work includes ensuring that community empowerment is happening, that it’s improving and that communities are benefiting and getting stronger as a result. We measure community empowerment using NI4, which is the percentage of people living in an area who feel they can influence decisions affecting that area.

The NEP is funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government through the Community Development Foundation and is delivered in the West Midlands by Regional Action West Midlands.

To see details of the 2009-10 projects please see here .