Communities in their places

Communities in their Places

There is value in equitable collaboration and knowledge-sharing between those with lived experience of a community and those involved in making decisions about it. Through working together, services, support and solutions can be delivered in an effective, inclusive and respectful manner, creating positive change and increasing community cohesion.

To learn more about how this can be achieved, the Communities in their Places work project focuses on community-led action, trialling new approaches and learning from examples of existing good practice.

How We Work

This work project consists of the Community Panel, whose members are also involved across the wider project, as well as several distinct pieces of work examining examples of community-led change. Its targets are:

creating, developing and supporting a Community Panel of community representatives to examine collaborative working and bring the voices of their communities into decision-making
undertaking a review of community impact projects
working closely with local community projects to help them evidence impact and develop a data-focussed legacy
facilitating the coming together of local communities, voluntary, and public sector organisations to build collaborative spaces (communities of practice) to create change together.

Why It Matters

We need to enable our communities to truly influence and participate in decisions about issues which affect them. This involves understanding how we can build trusting and respectful relationships not only between communities and decision-makers but also within communities to encourage community cohesion and engagement. Through seeking to understand what is needed, how it can best be done and who is best placed to do it, this piece of work aims at breaking down barriers to effective and inclusive involvement in positive community change.

Our Priorities

YPIP Community Panel –a diverse mix of community representatives exploring collaboration which is inclusive of all and enables the voice of underrepresented groups to be heard in decisions which affect them.
Exemplar Review– collating examples of communities participating in local action to better understand how they achieve impact, increasing knowledge around effective community engagement.
What Works for Communities –partnering with regional community organisations to co-produce data gathering tools to evidence impact both now and over the longer-term.
Working Together to Achieve Change– bringing together stakeholders from across the different sectors to explore effective change-management.

YPIP Community Panel

Too often community improvement projects are decided by councils and governments without asking people who live in communities what they would want.
We believe that people who live in communities should help make decisions on projects that affect them and their local areas and so this project aims to put communities at the heart of our decision making.

We have set up a Community Panel to help us achieve this. The panel will make decisions about how the project runs and how we can improve our communities by agreeing on good practice examples of living and working sustainably in our communities.
Our panel is made up of 23 people from diverse cultures, communities and places across Yorkshire, including Bradford, Castleford, Harrogate, Hornsea, Hull, Leeds, Pocklington, Scarborough, Sheffield and Wakefield.

Our panel represents the voices of those who are often underrepresented or marginalised in research and policy making, and experience inequality in their everyday lives. Members include young people, older people, neurodivergent people, those living with disabilities or long term health conditions, migrants and refugees, care leavers, LGBTQ+ people and people with experience of homelessness, poverty, mental health issues, addiction, racism, and the criminal justice system.

The panel meets four times a year either in person or online. Members have also been nominated to join each work package team, and to represent the panel on the YPIP Governance Board.

Exemplar review

Understanding community-led and community partnered social action across Yorkshire and Humber helps to understand what makes these initiatives effective through what motivates them, the ways they work and the benefits it brings to the community. The review covers initiatives working across different communities, geographical locations and purposes. It both informs the next stages of work for the Communities in Their Places team and adds learning to how policy makers can better support and engage communities.

What works for communities

One of the main priorities for YPIP is enabling communities to make a difference for themselves. Working collaboratively with five demonstrator community-led organisations and social-actions across the Yorkshire region, the Communities in Their Places team will work to provide a bespoke co-owned report that evidences the impact that the demonstrators have through their community centred ways of working. In doing so it will provide communities with the tools to influence regional inclusive-growth, and sustainable living strategies.

Working together to achieve change

This pilot activity is designed to amplify community voice by building collaborative spaces where difficult conversations can be held to build trust around new ways of working, relationship building and co-learning between participants for joint change between communities, the Voluntary and Community Sector and local authority stakeholders. participants. This will be piloted in Hull, North Yorkshire and Sheffield where we will co-create generative spaces (through dialogic workshops and forming a community of practice) facilitated with training support from a community-based knowledge-exchange organisation.