Themes from January 2007 interviews
Below are some common themes that have emerged from the first round of interviews about the RE:generate project, in the words of the interviewees.
Coordination and communication
It’s the implementation and accountability, I think that’s where we break down. Somebody actually carrying the can and saying, right, I will be responsible for this initiative and I will drive it
Pam Stewart, volunteer
I think from my point of view I haven’t seen enough in terms of that building up of trust and communication.
Colin Greenhalgh, Groundwork
We’ve now got the strategic partnerships thinking more about local needs and how they respond to these when planning, resourcing and commissioning service provision, and about how they identify needs and gaps in services and how they collect and use information to inform service development. But one of the things we’ve not been as good at, in my opinion anyway, is using information we get from our neighbourhoods, to inform the strategic planning processes. Part of the challenge is to rethink how we engage and consult with our communities and how we use this information to bring about improvements in our neighbourhoods.
Angela Foster, principal funding officer, Wigan Council
We need to do more to improve communication and encourage residents to be more active in helping to solve some of the problems themselves.
Angela Foster
I think there’s some work that needs to be done there to bring the community together and we need to make sense of all the agencies that have been granted money to do work in the area and to make it simple, so people understand what’s going on and ensure that agencies are not duplicating work.
Darren Barton, township manager, Wigan Council
I want good communication systems to have been set up. I want information out to the community about what’s happening in the area, but I also want officers to start addressing some of the issues we’ve got in the area to make a real push to improve things.
Darren Barton
If I was sitting here in three or four months’ time and was perfectly happy, I’d hear people talking about it [the Regenerate project], I’d hear people talking about it in a knowledgeable way, and I would feel that I understood myself where the work was up to.
Sian Jay, township programme manager, Wigan Council
The need for better evidence
You need to find out what’s going on and that in itself is the task: once you know what’s going on you can join them together, and it’s making that link and being that link, but you need to find out actually what’s going on, so it’s a mapping exercise
Pam Stewart
[I want to see] an awareness of what’s going on. If when Regenerate leave that’s the only thing they’ll have left behind, as a member of the NRF panel that funded this I’ll be really happy in the fact that we need this piece of work to be done, but up to now nobody’s ever done it.
Pam Stewart
We’re about delivering quality projects and getting close to communities and to deliver that you’ve got to know what people want, and I see Regenerate as being a very effective tool.
Colin Greenhalgh
I hope involving some of the service providers and training them in the Regenerate listening processes will help them to think differently about the way they provide and develop services or to ask different questions to find out what residents really feel about service provision and to gather information differently, so this can be shared further up the hierarchy to let senior managers know what they their customers want and can inform and improve strategic planning processes and resource allocations.
Angela Foster
That was the point about what Regenerate would hopefully deliver – a lot of tough questions but real hard information about what are the issues in the community. The problem is we get money from various sources and put together what we think are fantastic programmes, but are they really addressing the needs within the community?
Kevin Walsh, economic partnership manager, Wigan Council
The need for services that are based in communities and responsive to them
I’d like to see that the training, the understanding of communities, will help to ensure the middle management layers within the council to start to appreciate that the third sector and other partners, community partners, can actually deliver things in a social enterprise framework.
Colin Greenhalgh
I think the ambition initially was to get ten community animators into local areas. I would like to see us being involved to some extent, with community animators linked into Groundwork, but I don’t think it really matters, it’s about having the right people in communities and those people empowering other people and using the training they’ve been given to train other people.
Colin Greenhalgh
We’d like to involve the group [One Voice] in the neighbourhood work and get some of their members trained in Regenerate’s listening process so they take this into the wider community through their connections and start to collect and share information with all partners.
Angela Foster
What they’re really doing is identifying market demand for a service or product within the community, and unless you have that fundamental market demand whatever it is you put in place is not going to be sustainable.
Kevin Walsh
I think some of the agencies in the area need to take a real responsibility in terms of getting to the people. I’d like Regenerate to be able to signpost people to services that are available to them.
Darren Barton
What’s appealing to me about this particular model is the way it encourages individuals to expect more of themselves, and then for those individuals to expect more from those around them, and then for those communities to expect more from the services that they need.
Sian Jay
Links to employment and health
One Voice has come a long way in recent years in terms of organisation and representing views and they want to develop social enterprise to help the community help itself.
Angela Foster
The brief was really to create social enterprises, but Regenerate came up with this innovative approach which involved the use of community ambassadors. The ultimate goal of the project is to create community enterprises which will have a bottom line target of creating sustainable employment.
Kevin Walsh
We need to look at things like training, confidence building, part time working that doesn’t affect residents’ earnings, but will get them back into work and if they want to progress further then great.
Darren Barton
Local culture and reputation of the area
The 1998 white paper Paul Boateng wrote, that was a fantastic piece of work. By the time it actually got implemented at Wigan it was 2001. Paul Boateng and central government had moved on three projects when Wigan were just coming to grips with the white paper.
Pam Stewart
This area tends to be quite unforgiving.
Pam Stewart
As a place Wigan is pretty parochial by approach – I guess it comes out of the mining mentality. When people from the outside come in they see Wigan as being very friendly, but that’s only up to a certain limit.
Colin Greenhalgh
The thing that attracted me to it [the Regenerate project] is that it would reach out into parts of the community that we’ve probably never reached and engaged with before, and hopefully we’ll then start to gain a better understanding of the low aspirations, low ambitions of people who live in Wigan. We’ve talked about it but we don’t really know why people don’t have the aspiration to get a better quality of life.
Kevin Walsh
We’ve got an unusual situation with Scholes. I personally don’t think Scholes is as bad as the figures say. I think certain things skew its ranking and make it a deprived area.
Darren Barton
I feel the feedback will be that it’s a good area to live in really, and people are pretty happy– why should they work when they don’t need to work, when they can survive on a relatively small amount of money?
Darren Barton
We’ve always been pretty clear that Wigan is a particularly insular place and that has contributed to a worrying lack of aspiration and a sameness that doesn’t lend itself particularly well to innovation and change… Wigan still remains a patriarchal society generally speaking; it remains a society that is resistant to change, to new horizons. It’s not a particularly inclusive society.
Sian Jay
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Sheffield S10 3TA
Tel: 0114 229 5726
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