Community Member / Parent / Volunteer

Who is this website aimed at?

This website aims to strengthen the strategic approach to involving young people in regeneration projects and support best practice with partners including;

Young People's Service
Schools and teachers
Neighbourhood managers & community engagement workers
Housing market renewal agencies
Local authority regeneration officers;
Developers and planners

This resource will aim to do the following:

Practically help you to understand the elements to think about for meaningful engagement of young people in Regeneration.
How creativity and working with creative practitioners can enable you to achieve this.
Set the policy context of why this is important.
Enable you to network with new and existing partners more effective.
Support you to know whether you are being successful.

Why is it important to use creative approaches?

Creativity makes this approach unique and assists in the development of long-term sustainable approaches to young people's engagement. The development of young people’s creative approach to issues in their own neighbourhoods is an invaluable resource and linking creative practitioners with young people unlocks fresh new thinking and innovative responses to the issues facing young people and their communities today.

The arts & creativity have the capacity to:

Develop a sense of individual pride and achievement and community spirit
Help reverse the spiral of decline in disadvantaged areas by fostering a new sense of community and civic pride amongst residents
Attract new commerce and businesses to deprived areas by generating improved cultural facilities and opportunities.
Provide a positive focus for community activity and innovative training opportunities
Recognise and celebrate cultural diversity for the benefit of the whole community.

Why is it important to involve young people as active partners in regeneration?

Young people are society's greatest untapped resource. If young people are not included in regeneration and renewal initiatives, a range of opportunities and possibilities are missed.

Pennine Lancashire is going through an enormous amount of regeneration and renewal and young people are currently not fully engaged on this process. There is an opportunity through the development of new partnerships and collaborations to enhance the opportunities for young people to be engaged in these processes, creating a meaningful creative two-way, conversation. This will result in new project activity connecting the partners with creative practitioners, accreditation for young people and new pathways to education and employment.

Over the next ten years a number of opportunities will arise e.g. creation of new parks and facilities, working with high quality architects and designers, the continued development of young peoples voice through the use of digital technologies. The partnerships need to be ready to influence this process for young people and support young people to lead the way.

Benefits for young people

Active engagement can contribute to the development of young people's citizenship, help develop decision-making and problem solving skills and generate meaningful involvement in wider community activity.
Engagement can increase young people’s understanding of the importance of the development of buildings and amenities in a community and their positive relationship to them.
Young people can work alongside design professionals and artists and contribute fresh ideas to inform the development of public spaces, community safety, transport, access and culture.
Through the experience of active engagement, young people commonly gain increased levels of confidence and show improvements in speaking, listening and presentation skills – key factors for employability.
Young people can experience new avenues of career development, gaining accreditation, ways into apprenticeships and employment.
Young people who develop a sense of meaningful engagement demonstrate increased respect for their communities and environments.
Young people often act as positive role models, supporting and influencing a range of activities in the wider community.

Benefits for partners

Young people’s imagination and creativity can be harnessed to produce exciting new approaches.
As key stakeholders in the community when seen as future residents, the engagement of young people is the first step towards long term and sustainable community stakeholder engagement
Young people who are engaged in meaningful ways develop a greater respect for their environment and are less likely to become involved in antisocial behaviour.
Creative engagement provides professional development opportunities for teachers and youth workers who will work alongside creative professionals and undertake practice based research.

Sustainability

This will be achieved through

More connected established youth engagement network, both physical and virtual to unlock knowledge, skills and resource from regeneration opportunities and vice versa.
Redirecting resource through new and existing partnerships into meaningful engagement methods.
A bank of case studies continuing to share good practice across the sub region.
Evidence of impact through case studies and an evaluation framework used to advocate with Elected Members & Chief Executives, increasing their knowledge and understanding of the need for meaningful engagement of young people in Regeneration.
A supported attitude of ‘looking to the horizon’ for new opportunities, funding and advocacy.
Well-informed and trained professionals in creative youth engagement, increasing the knowledge, skills and quality of creative youth engagement in regeneration.

Policy & Strategy

Two core frameworks have informed the development of this toolkit:

National Youth Agency: Hear by Right - a nationally recognized standards framework for the participation of children and young people.

Lancashire County Council’s Youth Council, Young People’s Charter - A set of principles for engaging with young people, written by young people. This outlines good practice and tips for quality engagement from a young person’s perspective.

Government Policy

Youth engagement is high on the government agenda. There is an increasing sense in all areas of government that young people should be more directly involved in determining the provision which is designed to meet their needs and to play a genuine role in shaping opportunities for themselves and other young people.

Youth Matters

http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/youthmatters/

The policies in Youth Matters aim to give all young people the chance of a positive future by helping them to learn in ways that motivate and stretch them and enable them to achieve; engage in positive developmental activities; make informed choices about their lives and benefit from high-quality, targeted support before problems escalate.

Every Child Matters

http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/

The agenda of Every Child Matters: Change for Children (ECM) aims for every child and young person, whatever their background or their circumstances; to have the support they need to:

Be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, achieve economic well-being

The Children’s Plan. Building Brighter Futures

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/childrensplan/

The Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures is the government’s new strategy for children, published in December 2007. It sets out the ambitions of government for improving the lives and outcomes for children and young people. It is a ten year plan which identifies key objectives and plans to make England the best place in the world for children to grow up.

The plan builds on the work of Every Child Matters keeping outcomes for children and young people at the centre, and focusing on the role of parent, carers and wider communities in achieving the vision. The roles of Children’s Trusts are central to the delivery of the Children’s Plan, as is the strength and quality of the children’s workforce.

Local Children’s Trust Partnerships

http://www.lancashire.gov.uk/corporate/web/view.asp?siteid=3767&pageid=12871&e=e

Communities in Control

http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/communitiesincontrol

A new government White Paper on community empowerment was published in July 2008.

This White Paper references the importance of engaging and empowering young people through active citizenship and giving young people a voice.

The Department of Culture Media & Sport (DCMS)

http://www.culture.gov.uk/

The DCMS continues to set the national policy framework for the arts, in partnership with Arts Council England. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/

Across Britain the arts are helping individuals and communities by:

Offering innovative solutions
Building bridges
Expressing differences positively
Breaking boundaries

In one or more of these ways, the arts help to address areas of social exclusion and bring key benefits to those involved:

Disability: Supporting the inclusion of people with disabilities
Health: Contributing to the improvement of the nation’s health
Crime: Helping to break the cycle of offending behaviour
Neighbourhood Renewal: Building community pride and supporting neighbourhood renewal
Cultural Diversity: Promoting understanding and respect between our different cultures

The Department for Communities and Local Government http://www.communities.gov.uk/communities/

The Department believes that culture and the arts should be placed firmly at the heart of both neighbourhood renewal and community cohesion. It aims to bring about the renewal of neighbourhoods, building community cohesion in disadvantaged and excluded communities.

Regional Policy & Strategy

The North West Regional Development Agency

http://www.nwda.co.uk/

The NWDA Regional Economic Strategy 2006 focuses on six goals of which Quality of Life is most relevant for culture.

To achieve the vision, the region needs to focus on three key factors:

Developing Culture and Image
Developing a sense of Community in the Northwest – including community cohesion
Improving the Environment – including capitalising on our natural assets, the quality of the visitors experience and the quality of the physical environment.

Local Strategic Partnerships in Pennine Lancashire

Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) have been set up to support local areas to work together to increase the social, environmental and economic well being of their communities and provide a single strategic focus. The composition of each LSP is unique to each area and reflects the make-up of that particular community.

There is an expectation that each LSP will,

Utilise resources more efficiently leading to improved services
Utilizing resources more effectively, thus improving outcomes
Making more co-coordinated and coherent decisions for the benefit of their area

The initiation of the LSPs reflects the desire by government to bring the various fragmented parts of local governance together and provide a coherent and cohesive approach to local problems and issues. In effect, LSPs provide ‘joined up solutions for joined up problems'.

Regenerate Pennine Lancashire (formerly Elevate)

www.regeneratepl.co.uk

PLDC is one of the government’s housing market renewal pathfinders, charged with finding innovative solutions to the problem of low demand and housing market collapse in towns across Pennine Lancashire.

A major part of the programme focuses on improving the quality and diversity of the housing stock, but the challenge is greater than that. Sustainable neighbourhoods cannot be created through housing renewal alone.

Funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, Regenerate PL is working with public and private sector partners - including the local authorities of Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle and Rossendale, and Lancashire County Council - to improve

economic prosperity,
the environment
community safety, cohesion
educational attainment
health
To make Pennine Lancashire a place where people choose to live, work, visit and relax.

Living Places

http://www.living-places.org.uk/

Living places provides a framework for partnership working between the cultural partners at a regional level. The Living Places agenda facilitates joint working amongst the partners and these regional case studies reflect that joint approach to culture in communities in the nine regions. Pennine Lancashire is a priority area for the North West.

Curious Project 6