There's a lot going on in our neighbourhood. We have several dozen agencies active in the area - across housing, youth work, health, education, environment, economic development, anti-crime - all of which have resources, good intentions and good people. But it's poorly coordinated, erratically funded and it feels like public agencies doing things to the locality not with the people who live here. We could certainly do with more money but what we really need is good coordination of existing services, continuity of funding/effort directed towards a set of agreed priorities.
The aim has been to see if we can establish a community-led management project for the area – one that is open, accountable and has some real clout. The general feeling seems to be “yes, we can” and, what’s more, we’ve raised some money to get it started.
