<< Home >> Introduction || Services
Community Cohesion Strategy
What is Community Cohesion?
Kirklees has proud, diverse and distinct communities. Cohesion is about making sure that everyone has the chance to participate, contribute and be part of a shared future.
There are divided communities and inequalities in Kirklees. The Kirklees Partnership aims to address those inequalities and take action to improve cohesion across out community.
The Community Cohesion Strategy for Kirklees
In 2007 the Institute of Community Cohesion produced a report for the Kirklees Partnership on the state of community cohesion in Kirklees. The full report can be found here.
This was then coupled with the Dara Singh report (Our Shared Future, which can be found here) to form the basis of a Community Cohesion strategy for Kirklees, developed by the Kirklees Partnership.
The voluntary sector was involved from its earliest stages, through consultation events run by the Voluntary Action Network and facilitated by an independent consultant, through to representation at the various meetings by key voluntary and community sector organisations.
The final version of the strategy, shows the priorities for Kirklees which are set out in five themes:
1. Leadership and Communication
2. Younger People
3. Diversity and the Voluntary, Community and Faith Sector
4. Shared Places and Opportunities for All
5. Preventing, Managing tension and High Risk Areas
You can find detail of the outcomes we will achieve in each theme in the strategy, which was published in March 2008 and can be found here.
The aim of the strategy is to make a positive difference to people’s lives on a day to day basis. It is hoped to create the circumstances where a diverse, yet cohesive Kirklees can flourish.
Practical steps, contained in the action plan, will ensure that communities’ aspirations are met and progress will be closely monitored and shared with all to demonstrate and learn from what is and is not working well. To oversee a VCS response, a VAN Community Cohesion Forum has been developed.
The overriding aim is to ensure everyone has a sense of belonging to their community and feels that Kirklees is a welcoming and enjoyable place to both live and work. There will be a focus on the issues that bring us to together rather than those that divide us.
For more information on the Community Cohesion Strategy, please contact Val Johnson, either by post to Voluntary Action Kirklees, 15 Lord Street, Huddersfield HD1 1QB, by telephoning or you can email her at val.johnson@voluntaryactionkirklees.co.uk
In addition to the strategy, there are also some Community Cohesion case studies, which can be found on the Kirklees Partnership website.
Further publications
To take forward the Community Cohesion agenda, on which the Kirklees Partnership is a leading local strategic partnership, the Department for Communities and Local Government has published a Community cohesion impact assessment and community conflict prevention tool.
This tool, which can be found here, allows local partnerships to assess whether the activities they are planning will have a positive impact on cohesion in their neighbourhoods.
The tool currently has two parts - a simple level 1 test and a more detailed level 2 test, carried out if the level 1 test suggests more thought is required. It is a series of simple questions which will be linked to the revised definition of cohesion, which allows all the possible impacts of a policy or activity to be thought through. It requires the user to have current detailed knowledge of:
- Local demography
- Local identity groups
- Local relationships between different groups and communities
- Local perceptions about services and whether they are fairly distributed
In addition to this, Nicola Sugden, the facilitator who worked on the series of VCS consultation events, has produced a summary of the Predictors of community cohesion, which is a multi-level modelling of the 2005 Citizenship Survey. It uses data from the 2005 Citizenship Survey, the 2001 Census and the Indices of Deprivation 2004. In particular, the research examines four separate models of community cohesion:
- individual level socio-demographic drivers of cohesion
- individual level attitudinal drivers of cohesion
- community level and individual level sociodemographic drivers of cohesion
- community level and individual level attitudinal drivers of cohesion.
Nicola's summary can be found here, while the DCLG's longer summary can be found here.
Finally, the Government's reponse to 'Our Shared Future' can be found here.
