It has arrived…
7 day blog:http://tinyurl.com/6zarqb
7 day twitter feed: http://twitter.com/communitiesuk
7 points for attention from the white paper:
1. being active in your community
2. access to information
3. having an influence
4. challenge
5. redress
6. standing for office; and
7. ownership and control
Am feeling strangely biblical all of a sudden… ;)
However, the thing that really stands out for me in the first posting is the sentence:
“We want to make these changes because we believe that local people are capable and willing to take difficult decisions and solve complex problems for themselves. ”
Along with the ever-present challenges around spreading good practice in an accessible way, the challenge of helping local people to believe that they themselves are capable of taking difficult decisions and solving complex problems is absolutely key to making enagement work at community level in the future. The promotion of personal empowerment.
(Also, making sure that the people involved do indeed want to have the responsibility of stepping up and taking control is another major consideration – this links into the co-design/co-production issues that are currently being debated… Institute for Innovation in Public Services recently produced interesting work in this area.)
Tags: blog, blogging, clg, communities, community involvement, empowerment, engagement, hazel blears, hazel blears blog, online, participation, social media, white paper
That’s an interesting point, Alice, that I was thinking about on the way home… how many people *actually* want to be empowered in the way set out in the white paper?! What if there aren’t enough and we are left with a huge black hole where the volunteering communities ought to be?