Empowering Communities

Empowering Communities supports local authorities, statutory agencies and community organisations to work together. This helps to give more power to communities and local people to make decisions about what happens in the areas where they live.

As well the resources on this website and other activities, Empowering Communities has two major programmes to help local authorities and communities:

Local Authorities

Our Empowering Good Practice programme helps staff, managers and elected members increase their skills and confidence to develop more empowering authorities. Based on research carried out by Empowering Communities in 2008 and managed by Zebra Collective, the programme offers courses in Community Leadership, PA4Change, Facilitation Skills and Monitoring and Evaluation. The programme, supported by the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership, is open to all authorities but prioritises those that have chosen National Indicator 4.

For more information, contact Michelle Virgo at Zebra Collective: michelle@zebra.coop.

Communities

We believe that networks are a potent and effective way of empowering people - both for communities of place and communities of every other kind. The South West is rich in networks and our Working with Networks programme nurtures networks that support empowerment. For more information on Working for Networks’ current activities contact Jan Crawley at South West Foundation: jcrawley@southwestfoundation.org.uk.

Who we are

The Empowering Communities partnership is led by Creating Excellence and brings together a range of statutory agencies, voluntary and community organisations, networks and people who are running community empowerment activities. You can see a list of who they are here on our website.

As a member the National Empowerment Partnership, Empowering Communities has an opportunity to influence national developments.

For more information about the background to our work and our plans see our latest publication here or contact John Skrine: john.skrine@creatingexcellence.org.uk.