Community Regeneration

What is regeneration?

Depending on whom you are and what experience you have of being involved within community regeneration you may or may not easily be able to answer this question. This field is one of those that suffers from ‘jargonistic language’ and the creation and use of far too many acronyms and abbreviations! This often makes it seem far too specialised or perhaps confusing, or out of reach.

If regeneration aims and objectives are to be achieved everyone concerned has to work together in partnership, sticking to the agreed plans. Regeneration works best when it is ‘from the bottom up’, when members of the community, volunteers, paid officers and development staff work together.

Keep it simple………the quotations below give straight forward explanations:

These two quotations refer to areas that ‘need to work again’, and are suffering from ‘deprivation’. Deprivation is a strong and emotive word, is the area where you live or work suffering from deprivation, and classed as a deprived area? You can check out the statistics, for example at www.nationalstatistics.gov.uk

Can we suggest that deprivation is a relative situation. By this we mean that there can usually be room for some improvement and change. Whether your community is reasonably well serviced by agencies, stakeholders, businesses and the voluntary & community sector or a particularly deprived community – change and improvement can usually be made. That’s the good news! The bad news is about who will bring about this change?

Change in a so called 'better area' will often come about with little or no help from agencies and stakeholders – it will naturally occur with minimal amount of help and funding support. Experience shows that there is often a good level of experience and capability within existing and emerging networks. Conversely, deprived areas often seem to get passed by, they usually have less so when times become hard they usually suffer more and hard times really do seem to stand out more!

The challenge! Improvements within communities can often be made by using and reorganising existing services and resources combining these initiatives with small grants that are usually available. In order to do this, close and strong partnership networks need to be formed and aims and aspirations need to be collective and agreed by all.

Picture the scene, your community is in need of regeneration – perhaps some small scale improvements or a large programme of regeneration initiative/s. And then consider this next quote about this subject :

PLEASE STOP……, slow down and read this section again, surely regeneration is really a massive and important subject, it is one which we at Community Acorns are passionate about. It is about your communities, where people live, work, play, go to school, do their shopping, in fact live their lives!

Because this is so important it is essential to get it right and where possible ‘raise the bar of regeneration standards and aims’. Whose decision is it to decide who does what, where, how and when? It is your community, why let others control and decide the answers to these questions. Get yourself involved, work hard to push and help bring about change that makes your community a better place for everyone.

Community Acorns can be employed by your community to play a role in its regeneration. Often the funding for our services can be paid for out of grant and our attitude towards regeneration is clear and straight forward. We work with our clients and their partner agencies to support and lead initiatives – the aim being to achieve sustainable regeneration and development in your community that will last and grow, making stronger communities for years to come.