A major project, supported by the Birmingham Better Care Fund, has recently started in Kingstanding, Birmingham. In addition to working closely with the residents of 10 streets over the next 12 months, the Kingstanding project is also seeing us partner with Connected Communities, an initiative that has worked to reinvigorate community links in seven locations around the UK.
Connected Communities is the brainchild of the Centre for Citizenship and Community, which is a partnership of the London School of Economics, the Royal Society of Arts and the University of Central Lancashire. We are working together to bring transformation to the area, with Street Associations rekindling community street by street, while Connected Communities undertakes intensive research about what the whole area’s needs are and seeks, with residents, to design solutions.
The project is envisioned as a two-year effort, at the end of which Professor David Morris, from the Centre for Citizenship and Community, will publish a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of the combined work and its capacity to provide a model for future community regeneration. The project follows the publication in October 2015 of ‘Community Capital: The Value of Connected Communities‘.
