Philip Colligan - 15.04.2011
The 17 community organisations involved in our Neighbourhood Challenge programme have posted their first blogs and we’ve awarded some fun prizes for the best ones.
When we set up the Neighbourhood Challenge, one of our priorities was finding ways to draw out and share learning throughout the lifetime of the programme. I've no doubt that we'll publish some research and policy stuff at the end of the programme, but we wanted to find a way for people to follow (and get involved in) the stories of each of the 17 community organisations throughout the year. We also wanted to keep it simple and make sure that people could tell their own story, in their words. That's why we settled on the idea of Wordpress blogs as a low cost, user friendly way of people telling their authentic story.
We've gone a little bit further too. Community organisations up and down the country will know the horrors of monthly reporting to their funders. Systems created with good intent, but that end up generating tons of work and reams of paper that adds questionable value. Accountability for public money is of course hugely important for funders, but does anyone really read the monitoring information that you send in to them? So we thought we'd try something a bit different. We're trying to manage all of the project "reporting" through the blogs.
Imagine a world where community organisations posted their own reports of performance and expenditure online and all of their different funders used that to satisfy themselves that they were using the money appropriately. Perhaps there are funders that already take this approach? If so, we'd love to hear from you.
Of course, blogging isn't everyone's cup of tea and it can be intimidating for a first time blogger - publishing to the world can be a bit scary. So we've got the fantastic Talk About Local supporting the "bloggers" and as an added incentive, I rashly offered to dish out some prizes for the best blogs.
Almost all of the 17 community organisations have now posted their first blogs and I've really enjoyed reading them. The competition was so tough that I ended up awarding three prizes:
Each of the winners has been sent a digital camera to help keep up their marvellous work and add more photos to the future posts. We keep asking all of the projects to post photos so in the spirit of practicing what we preach, here's photo of our own as we get ready to send out the cameras to the three winners.
Philip Colligan and Alice Casey with the prizes
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WhyNotChange
20 Apr 11, 5:16pm (2 yearss ago)
A great start
It's fantastic to see the projects off to such a great start. I look forward to hearing about their fantastic impact as the journey progresses. We thought that the neighbourhoods might be interested in learning a little about our journey. Having held our 1st meeting in January we didn't feel able to apply for this initiative but feel very much aligned to it. We have an under-used church hall which was in danger of being sold to housing developers. The local priest didn't feel that this was a good idea but was unsure about potential alternatives. Through chance he came across WhyNotChange and over a cup of tea we came up with some suggestions. What struck me was that here within this area of multiple deprivation it was clear that there were some well established community groups. The church congregation was one, as were the various clubs using the hall. However, so were the young people with nowhere to congregate other than the street corners. Out of this observation came our vision - to engage the neighbourhood to identify services that they would like to use and then for us to support local people to deliver these using the church hall and the grounds it stands in. In this way we will turn it into a thriving community and social enterprise hub. Fast forward just 3 months and without the benefit of funding our progress has (in our humble opinion) been phenomenal. We have a fledgling community cafe open which is being staffed by learning disabled young adults. Our community garden has been cleared and is being dug over. Alongside this we have created allotments for local schools. A 22 year old young lady has started a theatre school and has been commissioned by a local school to produce their annual show. A young lady who by her own admission hasn't always been a model citizen has taken responsibility for our youth voice. In just 4 weeks our teenagers wrote their own music and produced a concert that played to a packed house (standing room only) ranging from pensioners to young children. This is the start of fund raising to create a recording studio. From street corners to stage in just 4 weeks - wow! Plans are under way to convert the heating to an eco friendly system and to obtain the funding to cover this. Our community is not short of ideas so watch this space for a potential bike recycling social enterprise and others coming very soon. So in just 12 weeks from a first tenative community meeting we are in a great place. Our action first, funding second approach has been well received by the local support organisations such as our MP, councillors, police and fire service. We are hopeful now that small pots will be found to enable us to undertake essential work such as converting the kitchen to accommodate disabled workers. Our aim though is for sustainable social enterprises not dependent upon funding. More to the point our neighbourhood has united to back this initiative. New friendships and partnerships are being forged and amazing talents being unearthed. We hope our work will inspire other neighbourhoods to see the possibilities which are not bounded by funding availability. If you have the vision and the will we believe that every one of us can make a significant positive difference. We greatly look forward to being inspired by the neighbourhood challenge winners and to learning from their experiences.