Written on February 8th, 2008 by Nick Booth
That’s the question being asked (and answered?) at the Birmingham Residents University on the morning of Thursday 28th February. Amongst the panel will be a couple of Birmingham’s blogging councillors – Martin Mullaney and Zoe Hopkins (intermitent poster) alongside Salma Yaqoob and Robert Alden.
Anyway what do you think – do you trust your local councillor to act as a champion for your community?
Written on January 30th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Click here for more video and audio from the Grassroots Channel.
Is there a solution to street racing in Birmingham? Masood Ajaib of the Washwood Heath based community enterprise Commpact thinks there is. He has signed up for an experiment to find a communal way of turning a dangerous Saturday night on Landor Street into a peaceful pastime somewhere safe. Listen here for the conversation or watch here for a sense of the problem:
Birmingham Community Safety Partnership
Commpact (link was broken – but expect it to fix itself!)
Click below to listen to the podcast
Written on January 20th, 2008 by Nick Booth
A short film introducing the work being done in Kingstanding by residents trying to tackle the connection between crime and grime. It was shot for a residents conference in The Hague at the end of this week. No intended to be comprehensive, more a way of allowing groups from The Hague, Birmingham and Glasgow to get a sense of each other’s neighbourhood, aims and problems. Obviously short films can raise far more questions that they answer, which is good because that encourages conversation.
Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum has been taking part in Bimringham’s Community Safety Partnerships Neighbourhood Performance Reward Grant. The pilot, with four residents groups, has been run by the Digbeth Trust. Each group gets a £10,000 grant to meet some agreed targets – often to do with rubbish and grafiti. If they hit their targets the group is arewarded with a £15,000 bonus.
More films coming, plus 4 podcasts from Birmingham which give much more detail of the reward grant.
Tags: youtube, kinstanding, nprg, crime+grime, nptech, birminghamuk, upyerbrum, podnosh, den+haag, hague, residents, active+citizens, activists, nptechuk, nptech
Written on January 20th, 2008 by Nick Booth
I’ve been scootling around the place recently making a series of short films as means of introductory pieces for a neighbourhood safety conference in the Hague this coming week. I’ve met four groups from Birmingham and two from The Hague, all working experimenting with ways to give residents more power in reducing grime and the associated crime.
Just before Christmas I also spent an incredibly wet day in Glasgow where I met some very fine people from the city’s shiny new Community and Safety Service. It’s pulling together funding, ideas, equipment and people from all of the different pots of public money aimed at tackling crime and grime.
Of especial interest is the structure. The GCSS is a non-profit company owned by the council, police, fire service and the city’s housing company. I sensed a really positive attitude among the staff I met. They seemed to have more energy and optimism than you might find among council teams in other large cities. Am I doing others a disservice or does the autonomy that can come with creating a social enterprise give the work force a greater confidence in their ability to change things?
Today Demos has also popped up a podcast about last years rather controversial report on dreams for Glasgow’s future. When the row bubbled up I thought that most of our cities need some sort of institutional hacks. One is doing anything in your power to remove the grey hand of bureaucracy from people’s working days – let ‘em do what they love to do rather than what the risk averse tell you they must do.
Alastair – who appears in the film – was very much a man after my own heart. He’s passionate about how social media can be used to connect neighbourhoods, including maintaining this blog for his home patch in Leith.Other films (which you can find here) and some Grassroots Channel podcasts (RSS) from Birmingham still to come.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: glasgow, crime+grime, gcss, greener+leith, den+haag, nptechuk, youtube, neighbourhoods,
Written on November 20th, 2007 by Nick Booth
PC Bernie Flynn has been working with young people in Quinton in Birmingham consistently since 2001, merging policing with youth work. For him finding the right people for the job and giving them time to show respect and earn respect is at the heart of good community policing. Anti social behaviour in and around his patch has fallen by 40% and in this podcast he explains how that has happened.
This is the most recent in a number of programmes on the channel about the link between policing, and community including the residents who run their own police station, patrol their own streets, those who had the courage to confront pimps and prostitution and how young people act as agents for safer streets.
Birmingham Community Empowerment Network
Briefing on Neighbourhood Policing as a pdf
Click below to listen to the podcast
Written on November 8th, 2007 by Nick Booth
In the 1989’s Birmingham’s leaders gathered at Highbury Hall in Moseley for a summit meeting. It was the second time such a gathering had happened and Highbury 2 spawned the idea to break the concrete collar which was stranggling the growth of the city centre.
With the ring road down it is 2007 and Stef Lewandowski is now proposing a crowdsourced future for the city centre, using us and a wiki to shape where next. Highbury 2.0 has my support, how about you?
Written on February 22nd, 2007 by Nick Booth
This is a picture of Chris Bongard who talks to the Grassroots Channel about his neighbours’ campaign to convert their wooden shacks in one of Barcelona’s old shanty towns into purpose built apartment blocks. You can see the homes they campaigned for on the right of the picture, just over Chris’s shoulder. He is standing in Parc Guell with the Carmelo neighbourhood behind him.
Chris tells a story that dates back to the 1970’s as fledgling street level democracy was emerging in Spain from under the shadow of Franco’s fascist dictatorship.
Closer to home we also have residents of Kings Heath and Edgbaston in Birmingham tell us why they love their neighbourhoods.
Click below to listen to the podcast
Written on September 25th, 2006 by Nick Booth
I’ve just noticed that the think tank Demos has launched a project on conversation called Talk us into it. You can download a pdf of their first pamphlet on the theme here. It proposes that
by combining what we know about conversations with what we know about the changing nature of community, we have the opportunity to reinvigorate the public realm to engage a wider range of people and give voice to the wider range of opinion on which our society is now built.
Curiously enough this throws me back to a conversation I had a good three years ago with a man called Grahame Broadbelt. At the time we were both working for the education charity Common Purpose – he as a staffer, me as a freelance. After years with CP Graeme had reached a stunningly simple conlusion – that ultimately it is the quality of the conversation which counts. It certainly struck a chord with me.
Almost all the work I have ever done has been improved and enriched by people willing to make the effort to have open, honest and challenging conversations. It is the route to that mental zing which in turn spawns the ideas and the energy to get things done. Of course this is a statement of the obvious, but oddly important in a world which seeks to measure every moment we spend against a tangible outcome.
I recently finished some work with R4R Europe – a vibrant network of active citizens from different European cities. 350 of us had spent three days in Birmingham listening to each other’s experiences, learning from each and building support networks. Everyone there had had a number of those ideal conversations – the ones with zing.
At the end someone stood up and asked where the outcomes of the different work groups would be posted. The R4R organisers replied that this is not the plan, but under pressure they agreed to sort out some bullet points for the different sessions. I absolutely sympathised with their position. To not agree to this almost looked like they couldn’t be bothered to write up the feedback. Yet what counted about this group was not the written feedback. It was the new things churning around in our minds. For each of us this meant an entirely different set of bullet points. This was the real outcome and it was all a product of nothing more complex than good conversation.
With my podcasting I have tried to create situations where conversation can both happen and be recorded. It’s tricky but sometimes works. A great example is when Sir Albert Bore met Natalie Brade. Have a listen, after all most us love to eavesdrop.
One last thing; Grahame Broadbelt isn’t at Common Purpose any more. He is now the Managing Director of Demos.
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Click here to download the podcast
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Written on September 20th, 2006 by Nick Booth
This is Sherez Sarwar. Now 18, he’s been involved in improving his community since he was 13. His efforts have helped revive George’s park in Handsworth and he’s become a street champion for his road in Lozells. Sounds like a goody-two-shoes? Well he isn’t and if you listen to this week’s Grassroots Channel podcast you’ll find out why.
Programme links:
Birmingham Community Empowerment Network
The BURA Awards for Community Inspired Regeneration
Click below to listen to the podcast
Written on September 20th, 2006 by Nick Booth
If you think you’ve been involved in a great regeneration project which has been driven and inspired from the grassroots here is a chance for you to get national recognition – but you’ll have to act quickly.
The British Urban Renewal Association is working with the Department for Communities and Local Government to recognise “outstanding grassroots regeneration projects; the schemes that address local issues and as a result are raising community spirit and improving quality of life.”
The site for entries is here and the entry pack here. You might think we’re bonkers telling you on the day entries close to get your form in. It’s not that bad. I’ve just spoken to Rob Brady at BURA who tells me their real concern is to get people involved. If you’re interested then give Rob a call (number on the Bura website) to let him know that a late entry is coming I’m certain he’ll be delighted to hear from you.
If you go for it please let us know – and good luck.