A community strategy

CDF is all about communities. Our work touches people’s lives in communities across England and sometimes across the UK. We particularly focus on areas which are underserved; those places where there are fewer opportunities for people because, for example, of reduced employment opportunities and public services, high cost credit, low incoming resources, limited open spaces or facilities. This affects everyone, whether they are young or old; male or female; or from a white, black or minority ethnic community.

It is made worse by the assumption of many public and private agencies that people living in those communities do not want or need to be served better, or that if they were asked, they wouldn’t have a view. CDF helps to explode these myths; local people care deeply about matters which affect them but often feel powerless to make a difference.

Communities are also diverse and contain individuals with different views, experiences and interests. People often come together and form groups, within single or across multiple locations, when they identify common ground and we call this a community of interest. What binds them is the desire to address a particular issue or maximise an opportunity, or share information with and provide support to each other.

Sometimes differing interests in a community create tension, but we also know there are often more areas in common than difference. We can facilitate dialogue to improve mutual understanding and identify the positive contributions each party can make.

In each of these situations we know that working in certain ways, using people who are trusted in those communities, or whom we can help to be trusted, that individuals and groups of people have huge capacity and potential to make their places better ones to live in. We act as the catalyst helping them to make a difference; our work is all about promoting, developing and delivering approaches which capture and invest in this potential.

It is often overwhelming for large national and local, public and private sector bodies to know where to start when they want to communicate or engage with people at a local level and vice versa. There are often vested interests at play and possibly historical tensions; local networks can be complex and the structures and language in different sectors can be unfathomable. Moreover, when it’s a matter of money being delegated to communities, funders need assurance that it will be spent appropriately and effectively.

Our strategy is to listen to and enable the voices of thousands of grassroots groups and the hundreds of thousands of people who run them and benefit from them to be heard. We want to channel the messages we hear and the evidence we see to the right places, to open the minds of people with power and to reach the hearts of people who care about making a difference. We want to open eyes so that people see that working with and through communities isn’t messy and unmanageable, but a dynamic potential that can make a positive contribution to the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of our country.