Thursday, 21 September 2006

Housing and neighbourhoods trends

JRF have just published an analysis of trends in housing and perceptions of neighbourhoods.

'Although overall levels of dissatisfaction have remained unchanged, two-and-a-half times as many people report that their local area is getting worse as report that it is getting better.'

Findings. Report.

21 Sep 2006 10:55:25 | Neighbourhood relations

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The goats in the machine: micro-finance in Kyrgyzstan Last week we visited a village self-help group in Mukur, near Kerben, which supports about 100 households in the village. The group had received a grant to buy 90 goats, which were shared among the 18 poorest families. When the goats come back from the mountain passes at the beginning of winter, the families will keep most of the kids. The self-help group will decide which families should have the goats next, and some of the kids will be kept as a kind of community resource. Fellow-traveller Eric Arnold, a banker with an interest in mirco-finance, was moved to imagine some kind of hole-in-the-wall at the bank in town, where local people are not just given the option of cash but, say, goats or potatoes. A goat is a reasonably reliable investment, although the goat population may not be that far from levels where deforestation becomes a concern (and then, with only 7% of the country available for agriculture, they could be in some difficulty). But a hole-in-the-wall that offered agricultural equipment, efficient irrigation and a marketing infrastructure might go down quite well.
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Everyday participation From time to time I bang on about the 'habit of participation' and people nod and then carry on with what they were doing. Here perhaps is a better term, in work developed by Liverpool Youth Services. 'A culture of participation can only develop if young people are able to experience participation as a part of their everyday life and not simply as a 'one-off' event... Developed in a series of workshops held with young people, Everyday Participation emphasizes the role of youth work as a seedbed in which young people can learn the basic skills and develop the attitudes needed to enable their participation in decision-making at multiple levels. Its working principles are: • Participation is a dialogue between adults and young people as equal partners in a process where decision-making takes place and results in change. • A culture of participation is a climate in which young people expect to be heard and involved, where participation is something that happens every day and not a separate event or activity. • Everyday participation integrates the aims of participation into the daily running of a youth group, making it a guiding principle of every session and every aspect of group life, not the focus of a separate initiative. This practice emphasises the use of everyday situations in all service settings as democratic moments where young people can make experiences through their negotiation of interests. It still makes it sound a bit special, having to take place in the running of a youth group, whereas what I'm interested in is overcoming the problem that so many people go through family and school life with very little or no experience of being involved in decision-making processes that affect them. But whether or not the principles feed down into schools and parenting classes, it's still eminently sensible. Source: Toolkit for youth participation in urban policies, Urbact 2006. Full practical guide here.

Kevin Harris

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