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
Digbeth Trust (dead link)
Commpact (dead link)
There’s an established link between grime and crime, which is why Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum is using public money to crack crime one fridge at a time. This podcast and the youtube video you can see here or here explain how the forum has been using £10,000 from an experiment called the Neighbourhood Performance Reward Grant.
Run by the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and the Digbeth Trust, this pilot has just come to an end. The reward is that meeting targets wil release a further £15,000 grant. Sustainable? Credible? Well listen and see what Les Smith and Rita Griffiths make of six months of the experiment.
Also see what’s happening in Sparkbrook.
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Benjamin Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, plays the audience at Davos. The job of leaders, he tells us, is to “awaken possibility in other people”.