A vital brokering role in the new wave neighbourhood projects

Posted by Rachel Rowney, NANM programme manager

Halifax Central neighbourhood management team have just won a well deserved place on NESTA’s Neighbourhood Challenge (out of several neighbourhood management teams who got onto the shortlist). A few months back Manton Community Alliance were selected as one of the Big Society Network’s participatory budgeting pilots. It wouldn’t be surprising to see neighbourhood management teams among the neighbourhood planning vanguards , further rounds of community based budgeting, and other new initiatives coming out of the Localism and Big Society policy push.

So despite the precarious position of many neighbourhood teams, a growing number are playing a vital brokering role in this new wave of neighbourhood initiatives, and one has to ask - if they don’t they who else would?

We’ve seen this clearest of all through our role helping establish the Big Local Trust. We’ve been able to meet some of the first 50 BIG Local areas as they to discuss their initial plans for using the £1million they will receive over the next 10 years. It is striking how many familiar faces we have come across like in Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, and in South Bermondsey, as well as fomer neighbourhood managers now taking on new roles.

But the real lesson we take from this is these new projects need people on the ground every day to facilitate and enable communities to take the initiative. It can’t be left to volunteers on their own, and it can’t be done remotely by someone at the civic centre with a loose ‘watching brief’.

And in many areas it is the same neighbourhood-based professionals who public agencies invested in over many years (and who in other parts of the country are now being made redundant) who are adding huge value in this new wave of community initiatives.

So in areas where the local authority has taken the lead on deciding how to use new funding, neighbourhood management teams have created the vital connections between the council and local community groups and activists, and increased the awareness among the wider population.

And where new programmes are being led by a community organisation - a resident group, school, faith community or volunteering organisation - the neighbourhood management team has provided expertise and routes into the local authority and other service providers.

We hope that in all the new BIG Local, Neighbourhood Challenge, neighbourhood budgets, or neighbourhood planning, initiatives where there are neighbourhood managers already on there on the ground, those links are being made.