Author: Stuart Muirhead

Getting There: Maddiston and Rumford Activity Report 2016-2017

This report outlines the work to date of the Getting There: Maddiston and Rumford project. The aim of this work was to explore with local people how they feel about the area they live in, and work with them to make some real positive changes. The report explores the main enquiry work that was done in the area that included:

  • Completion of a local enquiry that involved asking local residents about their experiences of living in Maddiston and Rumford.
  • A Community Feast event that brought together local people and organisations to celebrate, and share food and ideas around activities that would benefit the area.
  • Following a community vote at the Feast, five local projects were given small amounts of money to spend on activities that were deemed to have a real positive impact on local people.
  • An asset map has been collated and hosted by Maddiston Community Council that captures the range of the local community assets (resources, places, activities and businesses) in the area.

This report isn’t the end of the story. We now hope to harness the positive momentum of the work and engage other individuals and organisations to both promote and take action on the findings of the project, with some of this already underway. We also want to highlight the partnership approach taken and help people explore how this could be tried out in other areas.

Please access the full report here:

Getting There: Maddiston and Rumford Activity Report 2016-2017

Getting there: Maddiston and Rumford – Short survey report

At the Maddiston and Rumford FEAST event we launched the findings of a community survey that we conducted in the local area. Towards the end of 2016, Maddiston Community Council and Iriss, with a range of other partners* helped design and conduct a survey asking local residents about their experiences of living in Maddiston and Rumford. We were delighted that over 200 adults from the local area and 250 children from Maddiston Primary School participated by filling in a paper survey, submitting answers online and being filmed on video. The majority of respondents were positive about life in the area but they also shared some things about what they would like to see improved.

Please click on the link to see the final illustrated report – Getting there short survey report

Physical copies of this short report will be distributed to organisatons, businesses and individuals in the area. We are now in the process of writing up a full report that not only includes detailed findings from the survey, but also explores more around the work that has been going on in Maddiston and Rumford and some key messages on taking this type of engagement and these ideas forward. We hope to have this report written up and drafted in March and published in April 2017.

*Braes High School, CVS Falkirk, Dial-a-Journey, Falkirk Community Trust, Falkirk Council, First Group, Forth Valley College, Maddiston Community Centre, Maddiston Primary School, NHS Forth Valley, SEStran

Place-based health – reform places, not organisations

This is a paper by Collaborate and the New Local Government Network that examines the health and well-being systems and England and advocates for a move to a more person-focused through a consideration of places and lifestyles. We like this thinking as it is moving away from the idea of integrating services as a solution to improving care, to integrating around what means most to people. There’s also a nice use of data visualisation to frame frame some of this thinking and the data behind it – see the full paper here.

Enabling City – approach and book

Here is a blurb about the Enabling City book (that is online a free to access) that caught our attention:

“At its simplest, Enabling City is a new way of thinking about communities and change. Guided by principles such as collaboration, innovation and participation, the pioneering initiatives featured in Enabling City attest to the power of community in stimulating the kind of innovative thinking needed to tackle complex issues ranging from participatory citizenship to urban livability.”

Check out the website and see Creative Commons shared book here.

Place-based approaches – A summary from Australia

This paper summarises the evidence on what we know, and are still yet to
learn, about place-based approaches to improve children’s outcomes. Over 12 months, the project investigated the Australian place-based landscape to understand how they could better promote children’s wellbeing through place-based initiatives. There is also a nice and quick history of place-based approaches from an international perspective. The paper is called The evidence: what we know about place-based approaches to support children’s wellbeing.

Participle – Learning from the London Circle

Participle ran an innovation project that started with older people themselves, that would include the abundance of experience and wealth and would ask how this could be shared in order to grow a new approach for all, rooted in prevention and the fostering of capabilities. Southwark Council, Sky media and the Department for Work and Pensions funded the open innovation. They worked with over 250 people in Southwark, South London to develop some answers.

The links to the full report and other details are here.

Animating Assets and action research

The Glasgow Centre for Population Health worked in partnership with the Scottish Community Development Centre to test asset based approaches to improving community health and wellbeing.
Animating Assets’ was a collaborative piece of action research. Action research involves researchers working alongside people for everyone to try out, develop and learn from different ways of doing things. There is a strong congruence between asset-based approaches and action research; action research is appreciative in that it recognises strengths and assets as a starting point for inquiry and builds and embeds resilience and capacity through the process of research itself. We are trying to incorporate the values of assets based approaches and action research into our project at Iriss. See the full report from their work here.

What Works Scotland – Place-based partnering

Iriss are a national partner with What Works Scotland. WWS is an initiative with the aim of improving the way local areas in Scotland use evidence to make decisions about public service development and reform. They are working with specific Community Planning Partnerships involved in the design and delivery of public services. Involved are a whole range of partners and there is a very much place-based approach, as they focus on four specific case study areas – you can find out more about these here.

Collaboration Readiness: Why it matters, how to build it, and where to start

Collaborate has been developing projects to understand the linkages between creative thinking, systemic culture change and front-end delivery, and the role that cross-sector collaboration can play in supporting them. In October 2015 they published a report outlining a lot of their thinking and findings. Key to this was:

“Only 13% of UK citizens surveyed by Ipsos MORI for Collaborate feel a stake in shaping the public services they receive.  The report includes more brand new citizen survey data that shows the need for much greater cross-agency collaboration at a local and national level.”

This connected with us around how we feel a wide range of people should be co-creators and designers of services, right from the very start, and we want to insert this approach into the heart of our project.

Promise Neighborhoods Initiative

The Promise Neighborhoods Initiative is a programme that supports community-driven, place-based efforts to improve educational and developmental outcomes for children in distressed communities in the US. There is a strong use of a community of practice approach that really resonated with the Iriss thoughts around the connections that are needed to make a difference in an area and to different groups of people.

See more about the initiative here.