"We need meaningful engagement and consultation. Allow people to realise what they can get involved with and equip them to lead on social action."
Community conversation participant.
Hosting a community conversation
In August 2020, the GLA Community Engagement team created an opportunity for Londoners to lead ‘Community Conversations’ about London’s recovery from COVID-19. The aim of these conversations was to hear Londoners’ views on the ‘Missions’ proposed by the London Recovery Board. These ‘Missions’ included areas of work the board proposed to focus on and they were published in draft in late July 2020. By inviting communities to host their own conversation, we’ve been able to understand, present and act on community voice. We put out this invite to communities: We want to hear your community’s priorities for recovery and whether the mission areas meet the scale of the challenge ahead of us.
We offered practical support to host conversation by providing access grants and a toolkit for hosts – we received 78 community conversation submissions which involved over 1000 people. The largest user/beneficiary groups engaged were self-described as young people, older people, Black and Asian Minority Ethnic groups.
What did Londoners say and what’s next?
The following key themes emerged across the conversations:
- Employment – flexible options, training and support (especially for older and younger people)
- Supporting young people – role models, and youth voice
- Physical health - Mobility, access to open space
- Support for small/grassroots organisations – Funding and opportunities to coordinate
- Local community activity – Communities leading, being visible and active, coming together
The specific insight from this rich information has been essential in building a picture for policy teams at the GLA. It’s supported the refining of the missions themselves and was presented at the London Recovery Board meeting along with other stakeholder insights gathered.
The meeting can be watched back here and the next is scheduled for 10 November. Further analysis is underway to ensure this valuable lived experience is not only shared with communities but informs the Recovery activities going forward.
Share this presentation with your networks outlining the feedback we received.
Here are some soundbites, which give a sense of the range, urgency and passion of Londoners.
"There's a lot of anxiety and existential angst about the future of the planet and its fundamental to the health and wellbeing of the population to make this kind of systemic shifts for a greener world. It's an opportunity to tackle system inequalities."
"adding on services to food banks - if the GLA could create networks and resources for volunteers in faith groups to use to support people at the local level that would be very practical and helpful!"
"Communities can share digital skills at a neighbourhood level, but they need support and collaboration with local stakeholders to access data and hardware."
"many stories that have shown negligence in young black women when receiving healthcare from the NHS. Unconscious bias needs to be stopped and young peoples voices again need to be heard."
"People assume you're 40+ you've got your life sorted, you have a career. But it could be, because of the pandemic, i have had to change my career. How will i change my career. How will I change that? Where will I get support from?"
"We should refocus on neighbourhoods in terms of people and communities rather than high streets. Communities don't always define themselves through their geography but through how they understand their culture."
Learnings
We’ve been reflecting as a team, on what worked well and what gaps we need to address in future engagement activities. It was clear that this has been a fast process, delivered in just one month, from idea inception to communities submitting their conversations. Engaging over August is not an ideal time, in terms of capacity across all sectors. The short window meant community groups had to apply for grants within a week and a half of them being launched and plan and deliver their conversations for submission within another three weeks. More time to plan, deliver and learn as we went would have been beneficial. Additionally more time would have enabled us to communicate effectively, and to plan for the resource needed to analyse the breadth of data that came back to us. We also heard two other points loud and clear:
Language – we’ll be working with colleagues within and beyond City Hall to simplify the language in our communications and improve access in community languages as well as disabled access.
Communications – we’ll be strengthening and streamlining our communications so that communities get the right information at the right time.
Email us at [email protected] to find out about future opportunities to be a part of City Hall’s work.