Community involvement within policy making and service delivery is central to the government’s drive to revive democracy and improve local services.

Relationships between authority and the community are changing with the aim that communities and service beneficiaries have a greater role in shaping the policies, programmes and services that affect their lives. Core to this agenda is the community leadership role from within communities and also the role of the local councillor as a representative of local interests.

The focus upon involving members of the community in influencing and shaping their own neighbourhoods is central to community development and explains our work on this theme.

What we do on leadership

To date, we have held two national seminars, interviewed practitioners and representatives and visited projects and individuals working on community leadership. Our events have brought together community representatives and activists, councillors, community development practitioners and policy officers to debate and share experiences and learning from work in this area.

• Click here to download the for October 2005 flyer for the seminar
• Click here to download the March 2006 flyer for the seminar

For the seminars we produced:

• A guide paper Click here to download the document
• A summary paper Click here to download the document
  

We will shortly be producing a full summary paper from our first and second seminars and also a policy briefing paper. These can be accessed from this site or by contacting us directly.

Key issues

Key issues that have emerged from our work center upon the language and meaning of community leadership, the role and legitimacy of the community leader, support needs of leaders, how to ensure new voices are heard and represented, the quality of the dialogue and involvement between communities and authority and how community leaders can and can’t influence.

If you have experience of these issues we would love to hear from you. You might also have experiences and insights to offer to the issues we raise below.

• We have learnt that community representation and involvement is more effective when it involves groups of representatives rather than just one leader. Do you have experience of group representation? Tell us about it, what works, what is difficult and why.
• Do you have experience of communities actually influencing the decision-making process? Tell us about it and how it worked.
• There are lots of participatory techniques for involving communities. Do you have experience of these being used ? If authorities want to ‘involve’ then why are these techniques not used more often?
• Can community members be trained to represent their communities more effectively? If so, what sort of training would be valuable? Could training be counterproductive in any way?

Contact us with your responses and comments.