Search...

Your Community

What Is Community Cohesion?

“Community Cohesion is principally the process that must happen in all communities to ensure different groups of people get on well together”
Commission on Integration and Community Cohesion (CICC) 2007

In an area with strong community cohesion:

There is a common future vision and a sense of belonging for all communities;
Diversity is appreciated and positively valued with recognition of the contribution of settled and new communities;
Those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities;
Strong and positive relationships are being developed in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods;
There exists a strong focus on individual rights and responsibilities;
There is trust in institutions to act fairly.

A key contributor to community cohesion is integration which is what must happen to enable new residents and existing residents to adjust to one another. Thus, community cohesion refers to a much wider set of concerns in relation to a community as a whole which may include service provision, economic development, issues relating to social inclusion, education, planning.

Why Community Cohesion is important to Urban Living
Community and cohesion engagement is as central to the work of Urban Living work as mixed-income, mixed tenure housing growth and neighbourhood renewal and regeneration.

This is because community cohesion is necessary for a sustainable community. At an extreme, people are not going to want to live in a neighbourhood that is subject to frequent disturbances and public order breakdown. The 2005 disturbances in Lozells and Handsworth were bad for existing residents and bad for the prospects of attracting or retaining future residents.

More positively, the better that people in an area get on and support each other in improving the quality of life in that area, the more attractive a place it will be, impacting upon housing demand and values.

Effective regeneration cannot happen without the full engagement of the people and communities involved. This is because community engagement in the development and delivery of proposals, together with effective communication has a key role to play in creating a sense of belonging and shared civic pride. Leadership capacity and local empowerment are in turn strong positive drivers of cohesion. This can mean encouraging people to invest in an area financially and in terms of community support, whether through volunteering, participating in a formal community organisation or through those simple but crucially important day-to-day small acts of civility, empathy and support to neighbours.

In short it is about what it is to live in a diverse and complex urban area in the twenty first century. This means it is not just a 'people' issue, but is also about 'place'.

Urban Living through its investment programme and the work of its cohesion and employment teams plays an important and increasingly recognised role in forging more cohesive communities.

Urban Living's role in forging more cohesive communities

The Urban Living pathfinder covers the most dynamic part of the Birmingham-based conurbation. It has a socially and culturally 'super-diverse' population that is rapidly growing. It is also the base for a wide range of voluntary and community organisations, including faith-based organisations. Many of these have been established for some time with a substantial record of tackling deprivation, equality and cohesion issues.

At the start of 2008 Urban Living recruited two community cohesion and engagement officers and the Board allocated a three year, £1.2m resource to 2011 for cohesion projects. Spending has been brought forward twice and the three year investment will now total £1.314m with £500k agreed for 2010/11.

From a standing start we came a long way in 2008 by simply getting out and doing things with fresh projects. This early work was necessarily broad for Urban Living to engage with local communities. But it was essential as we developed projects to avoid “rudderless pepper potting” by grounding our cohesion activity within a wider strategic framework. The cohesion strategy and action plan was developed through this process of learning and at the same time it gave a clearer, more focused framework for the work.

Consequently the Urban Living Delivery Board in September 2008 approved our draft community cohesion strategy and action plan, which was then finalised after an extensive local consultation and has since been regularly updated. Our strategy has been an exercise to harness local evidence and the policy and roles of Urban Living partners; and specifically, five objectives to guide project development in an accelerating programme. These objectives are designed so that all activity helps to address a number of identified drivers that foster or weaken community cohesion. These are:
- Supporting young people: promoting intercultural activity for young people in the area, including with young people from outside the Urban Living area, which promotes greater understanding and solidarity, and activity which improves young people's life chances.
- Creating a sense of belonging: designing and delivering initiatives or public spaces, housing and other buildings which encourage interaction between different groups in the area, which meet diverse needs and which reflect the diverse histories of local residents.
- Meaningful interaction: enabling cross-community and cross-age cultural, sports, educational, environmental, volunteering, event or initiative planning, and other relevant leisure activities.
- Improving access to opportunities: initiatives to improve local residents' social and economic life chances, to strengthen the local economy and to open up access to needed services.
- Engagement, Communication, Empowerment and Leadership: Sustainably increasing the capacity of local communities to engage, influence and contribute to future regeneration and renewal activity with the development of a network of community organisations, mutual support and social capital and community, service provider and political leadership around community cohesion.
Urban Living's impact to date on community cohesion
Monitoring returns from our community cohesion projects since 2008 show the following outputs to end-2009:
- 94 voluntary and community groups have been supported
- 279 volunteers have worked on projects supported by Urban Living
- 7 facilities have been improved
- 107 events bringing people together in meaningful activity have been organised
- Over 10,700 residents have participated and benefited from the activities organised
- Of these, over 8,500 were young people, including 190 who benefited from mentoring
- 74 schools have been involved
- 37 employers have been involved
- 199 people have achieved qualifications through training/learning programmes
- 23 jobs have been created and a further 21 people directly helped into jobs
- 6 businesses have started up
Every year Urban Living is inspected by the Audit Commission. Their latest judgment in the 2009 Performance Review published in March 2010 is that Urban Living with its partners is performing strongly in the area of cohesion and engagement compared with an adequate performance assessment two years ago and performing well last year. They note:

“Urban Living with its partners is now performing strongly in its approach to community cohesion, consultation and support. It is working well with a wide variety of different organisations to improve the way it works with local people. The board and staff are now more representative of the pathfinder area’s population. Urban Living has increased the investment it is making in promoting community cohesion and engagement. Local people are actively engaged in planning and developing interventions for their neighbourhoods. An engagement strategy is now in place although it would benefit from a more rigorous approach to evaluating outcomes.”
Click here for the Audit Commission Performance Review

As part of the Audit Commission inspection we had to write a self assessment of how all our actions are to be based on effective engagement at key stages to meet local needs, to support those affected by change, and to promote cohesion, equality and community capacity.
Click here for the Urban Living cohesion and engagement self assessment

Urban Living commissioned an independent external evaluation of the cohesion and engagement programme by local consultants CSK Strategies Ltd and the executive summary of their report can be found below.
Click here for the executive summary of the Urban Living evaluation

Urban Living plans for Community Cohesion in 2010/11

The Urban Living Delivery Board on 26 February received a report: Community Cohesion and Empowerment in Difficult Times: Overview and Strategic Framework for 2010/11 and Beyond.
Click here for this report

The evaluation report and Board discussion highlighted the following success factors for activity next year:

Concentrating on areas where Urban Living can make the biggest impact.
Focusing on developing the leadership and capacity of local communities to engage in, influence and enhance the positive impact of developments in their neighbourhoods.
Adding to and helping sustain community empowerment mechanisms and particularly the alleviation of tensions that may be exacerbated by change.
Linking with employment and training and economic development.
Ensuring alignment with the mainstream Urban Living programme and future regeneration plans of partners so that physical development takes place in tandem with social/community development.
Funding and project development within the mainstream of Urban Living needing to reflect an integrated approach to community engagement and cohesion.
Prioritising initiatives which reinforce sustainability of regeneration and community cohesion.

The Delivery Board agreed the following in relation to the 2010/11 community cohesion programme:

Increased emphasis is to be given on capacity building and leadership development and supporting the third sector.
To continue with the neighbourhood targeting determined in the community cohesion strategy and action plan, namely Handsworth and Lozells, Newtown and Windmill Eye in Smethwick, although resources are not to be exclusively focused on those areas.
The two local authorities will also use their enabling role to help generate projects that directly bring resources to community/third sector organisations and individual community leaders, particularly in our target neighbourhoods via close working with neighbourhood managers.
Improving delivery by outlining more clearly the mechanisms through which impact can be made through three new delivery themes of people, organisations and places which interlock around the capacity building agenda (see box below).

New themes to guide capacity building agenda
People - helping to develop the skills and contribution of individual residents to influencing and securing the future of their neighbourhoods
Organisations - strengthening the capacity of local groups to engage in, influence and contribute towards regeneration and improvements in economic and social opportunities for local residents.
Places - from which an increased and improved range of community services and self-help activity can be provided.

The Urban Living Programme Management Board on 30 March agreed the following budget allocations for the 2010/11 community cohesion programme:

2010/11 community cohesion budget	£000s
Continuation projects from 2009/10	136
Community skills support (leadership agenda)	100
Third sector organisational development	100
Cohesion-based employment and training and neighbourhood projects	65
Community Cohesion Chest	75
Fees (BCF, appraisals, training, events etc)	24
	500

Click here for the full Programme Management Board report
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3