Tick Box Community Engagement – Time to Reconnect?
The past year has been an interesting and some might say an unfortunate one for Neighbourhood Policing. Frontline officers have been saying for some years how this bedrock of our police service is being slowly eroded due to increasing cuts to funding and police numbers. Now we are starting to hear more Chief Constables espouse […]
A Community Where People Care Enough To Act
So there we were, police, council and housing officers together with resident street champions and councillors, all gathered outside of the Oaktree Sports Centre in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, on a freezing cold December’s evening. In less than an hour it would go dark which left us with about 45 minutes to be briefed and to venture […]
Communities where no one wants to get involved?
On my travels and during my workshops I often hear individuals in ‘agency world’ discussing how no-one in the communities they work in (you know, the ‘deprived ones’) wants to get involved in volunteering activities that will make their area safer. Do any of these common complaints sound familiar? ‘No-one wants to get involved in […]
Doing a lot without doing a lot
In my last three blogs (here, here and here) I explored some of the issues and challenges around Bishop Desmond Tutu’s famous quote about pulling people out of the river, finding out why they are falling into the water in the first place, and then taking action to stop them. But what if we could […]
Silent Working
‘There comes a point where we need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.’ Bishop Desmond Tutu But first, we need to discover the ‘silent working’ in our organisations. Getting upstream and stopping people falling in – sounds like an easy journey doesn’t […]
Time to get off the ‘pontoons’ of Early Intervention?
‘There comes a point where we need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.’ Is Bishop Desmond Tutu describing Early Intervention here? Or is there another path we can take? In my last blog on getting upstream of the river to stop people […]