Monday, 04 February 2008

Community cohesion: stimulating more interaction

The government's response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, published today, anounces new actions including guidance for local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction between people from different backgrounds.

The proposed actions are:

* Specialist cohesion teams to be established by central government to provide advice on conflict resolution, mediation, leadership and on the steps that local leaders might take when new people arrive in their area.

* Local authority twinning - between areas of the country experiencing similar issues in order to share ideas and solutions to inspire innovation to respond to these challenges.

* New guidance for local authorities on developing Information Packs for migrants.

* Consultation on cohesion guidance for funders - to encourage local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction, and reducing funding for single groups.

* All local authorities will have access to an impact assessment tool to assess whether the activities they are planning will have a positive impact on cohesion in their neighbourhoods.

Press release.

4 Feb 2008 11:48:47 | Citizenship and democracy, Cohesion and diversity

1 Comment

Let's hope the specialist cohesion teams consist of people who are already working for better understanding and friendships between communities, rather than people who are just being shifted out of whatever other funding streams are coming to an end (and there are plenty of those).

Posted by: Julian Dobson | Sunday, 10 February 2008 at 23:35

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Memories of childhood and street parties With the Children's Society's project on 'cherished early memories' we're sure to hear plenty about how the childhoods of many older people were happier and their neighbourhoods blessed with a more 'enfolding community.' I don't dispute the validity of many such accounts, any more than I'd dispute the reported unhappiness of much contemporary childhood. But in trying to write about intergenerational aspects of contemporary street parties, in work I'm doing with Streets Alive, I'm struck by the feeling that childhood happiness was so often constructed in a way which no longer applies. Some of the photographic evidence (eg) from the mid-century street parties (VE day, the coronation, the jubilee etc) suggests insights into the differences in older people’s perceptions of community and public occasions. Typical images (eg) show children sat at a row of tables along a street or in a playground. Bunting and flags distinguish the occasion. Adults, mostly if not exclusively women, stand round, usually at the children’s backs, policing the territory. The menfolk, we’re sometimes reminded in reminiscences, had performed their roles in securing the bunting, sorting the wiring for loudspeakers, and setting up the tables, and were most likely down the pub by tea-time. Scanning these images, it’s often difficult to discern many smiles on the children’s faces. This adds to the niggling impression that they have been corralled into this arena, been told that they will enjoy themselves, are prohibited from escaping or improvising their own entertainment, and afterwards, will be told that they enjoyed themselves. And surely, for many, that’s how the world was. There were hierarchies of authority which knew what was best for you (not just government, council, church, teachers, extended family, parents etc, but other institutions such as the BBC and the police as well) and it was culturally eccentric to question them. The world had an order to it and street parties, like so much else, conformed to that order, that sense of solidity. What we have here are some of 'the solids' whose turn has come, according to Zygmunt Bauman, 'to be thrown into the melting pot and which are in the process of being melted at the present time, the time of fluid modernity.' These are 'the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions - the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectivities on the other.' (Liquid modernity p6) If studying street parties and childhood memories (and responses to climate change, come to that) show us nothing else, they should help us understand how individual action in relation to collective initiative is changing at local level.
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Public libraries and multicultural relationships Helen Carpenter, who managed the Welcome to Your Library project, has just published a very readable report about her international study tour on the role of public libraries in multicultural relationships. She considers the relationships in terms of: how public libraries connect as institutions with all relevant stakeholders how they plan and deliver services that reflect, support and promote diversity how they enable inter-cultural dialogue and encourage active citizenship in a rapidly changing environment. Helen visisted Canada, the USA, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and the report offers numerous little snapshots of good practice with professional reflections. More insights on her travel blog.

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