The document discusses the Norwich City Council's Community Enabling Team and its approach to creating spaces for community involvement and empowerment. Some of the key aspects of their approach include reframing conversations to focus on how they can help communities rather than telling them what was done, building relationships and trust, defining success based on what neighborhoods want rather than what institutions want, and enabling neighborhood decision making. Specific programs discussed include grants for community projects, digital sharing platforms, community gardens and art projects, community meals, and evaluating programs from a community perspective to inform future initiatives. The overall aim is to shift to a more citizen-driven and bottom-up approach that empowers communities and creates space for them to thrive rather than just providing

1. Norwich City Council: Community Enabling Team
Creating Spaces for Community
the start of our messy journey

2. Norwich: a City of Stories

3. ….or A Tale of Two Cities

4. Council Context

5. Reframing the conversation
• Move from You Said, We Did
to
• How can we help you, get alongside and create space
• Starting with where the community is at
• Honest about what we can and can’t

6. Core threads of approach
• Enable neighbourhood decision making
• Language and culture of approach: strengths based
• Building relationships and trust
• Success defined by neighbourhood not by institution

7. Lumi: Digital Sharing platform
Get Involved Grants (£50-500)
Package of grants to support building community
Thematic Networks
Space, Skills & Stuff: Connecting Community Resources
Alongside…

8. Rosary Road, Thorpe
Hamlet, Norwich
• Close to the city centre & night time economy
• River side walks, heritage sites,
• Homeless shelters & accommodation
• Churches & cathedral, schools, train station
• Prostitution, curb crawling & sexual activity
• Drug dealing
• Drug taking & leftover drugs paraphernalia
• Littering & Fly Tipping
• Anti social behaviour

10. The Old Library Wood Collective

11. Power
versus
Empowerment

12. Strategic
Positive Action
& our Strengths

13. Why Art?

14. Results &
Next Steps
• Positive feedback but…
• Community Herb Bed, Wall Art & Post Pandemic Events
• Community fitness?
• New Website
www.oldlibrarywood.org

16. Heartsease Healthy Living Project 1 (& 2)
Funded by Public Health through Healthy Norwich
To improving health and wellbeing outcomes for residents
of Heartsease
• HHL 1 piloted approach to doing things differently working
with strengths of the community and building relationships
• Are there services local community can provide themselves?
• Grant available only to local community (org/res/business).
• Small grants (£1000) distributed to local community through
community engagement & elements of participatory
budgeting (?)

18. Community meals at Café 33 – to provide affordable hot meals,
company and support
Youth Table tennis taster sessions at Frere Road Community
Centre –
Bushcraft sessions for children at Heartsease Primary
Academy
Fortnightly cycling group run by Mind and Pushing Ahead –
free, fun and friendly cycle rides for beginners
Free complementary therapy tasters and sessions from Mind
– the chance to feel Pampered
Healthy Hive drop in session at St Francis Church – relaxed,
regular drop in sessions where people can come together
Family community meals at St Francis Church come together
to eat delicious food, chat, enjoy new company and try new foods.

19. Listening to all the voices
• “I have made some wonderful new partnerships and learned a lot
about the local community”
• “I think that the project has benefited those directly using the service
for which we are grateful. Our project has delivered at every level that
we hoped for. However I do not feel that it has improved awareness or
collaborative working between organisations in the area”

20. Community focussed evaluation of HHL 1 pilot informed
Heartsease Healthy Living 2.

21. Norwich Notes:
from
community
currency
to
community
conversations

22. Going hyper-local

23. From surveys to conversations
There’s been
so much going
on…

24. Discovering what’s strong…
and leaving space for ‘How?’

25. Covid: Neighbour to Neighbour +
Resident led food provision

26. Community power and how we get there
This is our challenge …
Council wide
culture shift
Create
relationships
not
transactions
Citizen driven
growth and
development
Focus local
and play a
supporting
role
Lead with
the good
stuff, not the
deficits
Ensure wider
voices and
diverse input
Do different
– don’t be
afraid to fail
Co-design,
don’t consult
Understand
learning in
stories as
well as data
Be ambitious
and don’t put
up our own
barriers
Bottom
up, not
top down
Empower
citizens
AND
officers

27. Whose success? Creating space vs creating place
• Tuckswood Green
• Is success an attractive space or a thriving
place?
• Change in contracting works, longer term,
slower approach
• If we create space for community to
build, the community will create place for
the community to thrive

28. Whose success? Creating space vs creating place
• Growing at home in covid times
• Post-covid growth – a place to be a community
• Growing community = growing community