Inter-Action (December 2021 Edition 1)

Community Homes Tees Valley – November 2021 News

November’s news from Community Homes Tees Valley the enabler hub for the region

Community led housing is not something new but it does offer something different to mainstream approaches to developing and creating homes and communities. It can be either new build or reuse and refurbishment of empty homes and buildings. It offers wide community benefits which can include creating training and employment opportunities for local people and communities.
To find out more visit our website: chtv.co.uk and do contact us.

What is Community Led Housing?

Community led housing is where:

• Open and meaningful community participation and consent takes place throughout the process.
• The community group or organisation owns, manages or stewards the homes in whichever way they decide to.
• The housing development is of true benefit for the local community, a specific group of people (an intentional community), or both. These benefits should also be legally protected in perpetuity.

Community led housing can take many forms:

• Community land trust
• Co-operative
• Cohousing
• Self-help
• Group self-build

For further information visit our website: chtv.co.uk

South Bank Community Land Trust – Homes to Let

Pioneering Care Partnership – Job Vacancies

Healthwatch County Durham – Communications and Administrative Officer

Responsible to: Project Lead
Accountable to: PCP Chief Executive & Board of Trustees
Located: Durham-Meadowfield Industrial Estate/home working
Scale/Salary: PCP Band 4, Point 7 – £19,976
Hours: 30 hours per week
DBS Status: This post requires an Enhanced DBS due to working with vulnerable clients as part of the outreach and engagement work.
Closing date: Midnight Thursday 9th December 2021

Job Description

Community Resilience Worker

Responsible to: COVID-19 Resilience Project Lead
Accountable to: PCP Chief Executive & Board of Trustees
Located: Working from home with significant outreach across County Durham
Scale/Salary: Band 5 £21,136 per annum
Hours: 37 hours per week
Contract: Fixed Term until 31st March 2023
Closing date: Midnight Sunday 12th December 2021

Job Description

Joining the Dots Facilitator

Responsible to: Senior Wellbeing Practitioner
Accountable to: PCP Chief Executive & Board of Trustees
Located: Greenhouse, North Durham with significant outreach
Scale/Salary: Band 5, £21,136
Hours: 37 hours per week
Contract: Fixed term until 31 March 2023
Flexible Working: Given the nature of the role it is expected that the post-holder will work flexibly. This may include working extended hours, evenings and weekends.
Closing date: Midnight Wednesday 5th January 2022

Job Description
Person Specification

Please visit www.pcp.uk.net/vacancies for an Application Pack. If you require any further information you can email hr@pcp.uk.net

Lloyds Bank Foundation – The Great Listeners Approach

More Detail about the Great Listeners approach

Aim of project:

Lloyds Bank Foundation is involved in long-term People and Communities work in Redcar and Cleveland (and five other communities across England and Wales). The Great Listeners approach in Redcar and Cleveland will be an essential part of the work, enabling residents to take the lead in researching local needs and views.

Supported by an independent community worker, Nick Beddow (Shared Places), the Great Listeners will be creating a community-led research approach in Redcar and Cleveland, to find out what 600 local residents feel strongly about in their neighbourhoods: what do they currently like and wish to see continue? What do they dislike and want to see change? And what are their own ideas for making life better for all?

What difference will it make?

Consultation has become a dirty word in the past because communities can feel that they are being used by big organisations in a paper-exercise which leads to nothing changing and no further communication about what’s been discovered in the research.
The Great Listeners approach is tackling this head-on: it is led by communities listening to each other and learning about their different views, needs and priorities, and then using these conversations to create a long-term community voice on local issues. The Great Listeners conversations will be gathered into a report which will be available to communities and used at action-planning and decision-making events to guide everyone towards collaborating better on community priorities. The Great Listeners will be bringing together many voices from many backgrounds and perspectives.
These 600 conversations will be a starting point for learning what’s important to communities; we will be listening to people who often aren’t being heard.

In March 2022 the findings will be shared with communities, service providers and funders, to help them consider future actions to meet local people’s needs. We are ‘learning as we go’ and trying to evolve an approach to community engagement which will continue and be built on further. We hope that the learning from the Great Listeners work will inspire new approaches to how we involve communities in helping to shape local services and influence decision-making.

How it will work:

These conversations will be happening in three areas of Redcar & Cleveland: Grangetown, Redcar and neighbourhoods in the East Cleveland area. These sites were chosen because they offer different environments and we want to see if that creates different priorities for people who live there.

The research will be undertaken by ten residents who will be chatting to others in their neighbourhood from January to March 2022. We will be recruiting the residents from the three areas during November and December, and paying them in shopping vouchers for a couple of hours work each week, over three months. This ensures that people who are receiving benefit payments can be involved, as we will be keeping to a maximum of £20 payment each week in the form of vouchers. Anyone over 16 can be considered. The only qualifications required are that they are good listeners and care deeply about their communities.

How Can Residents Apply?

We will be sending our recruitment poster to communities throughout November and early December to invite people to express their interest in becoming our “Great Listeners” or “Community Explorers” (we’ll ask the recruited residents to decide on their own name).

The first step is for interested residents to contact Nick Beddow by phone or text 07985 570168 or email nicksharedplaces@gmail.com

Nick will contact each person to explain the project in more detail, and ask about their interests and social background – where they live, age, involvement in their community, etc.

As we have only ten places available, in mid December we will choose ten people who give us a good mix of backgrounds (where they live, and a mix of all social factors such as ages, gender, ethnicity, mobility, etc).

Everyone who applied will be contacted by Nick before Xmas: those chosen for the ten places will be asked if they still wish to go ahead, and everyone else will be asked if they are willing to be kept on a list of reserve places if any of the ten Great Listeners can’t continue.

In mid-January the ten Great Listeners will meet Nick in a local venue to train together as a team; a three hour meeting will look at their views on the issues locally and begin to use the chatting tools on each other. We will be deciding together the best ways to begin the local chats. Each Great Listener can decide when to use their own time each week (usually two hours to complete ten chats each week), and will be paid by Nick fortnightly at update meetings (usually one hour). They will also be paid for the training and meetings.

Explorers Recruitment Flyer Grangetown
Explorers Recruitment Flyer Redcar

Teeswide Safeguarding Adult Board – DA whole system review: Next steps

Thank you to those that were able to make the meeting on Friday. We really appreciated you all sharing your initial thoughts and reflections, and we recognise for this review to have the impact it should, there are some elements that we need to continue to strengthen. Ensuring the review is of a high quality is really important to us, and we will ensure that it is.

As such we have a number of asks of you as a strategic group to help us get the information and data we need. Our main focus will now be:

• to reopen the victim survey and perpetrator survey
• to make further attempts with services to identify victims that would be willing to speak to us
• to conduct the 2 case audits per Local Authority area

Victim survey

The link to the survey is: https://wh1.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=163067827316. It was noted at the meeting that there were several surveys live around the same time which probably contributed to the low response rate. As we approach the 25th November (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, also referred to as White Ribbon Day) and the subsequent ’16 days of action’ this is a prime opportunity for us to ensure this survey reaches as many members of the public as possible. We will keep the survey open until the end of the 16 days on 10th December. Our asks of you:

• Please share the survey internally within your service so that all frontline professionals can share this with their service users. Whether it is health visitors, social workers, police officers or specialist DA services, this survey can be sent to people.
• Please share this survey with your internal communications teams and request that they advertise the survey over their social media channels (Twitter, Facebook etc) and any other networks (e.g. residents newsletters, community groups). We previously requested that you all send us contact details of communications colleagues so we could set up a meeting with them all together for a joined up approach but we only had one response from Claire. We are happy to offer to do this again if it would be useful, so please send us the contact details and we can get in touch with them directly if you would prefer.

Perpetrator survey

The link to the perpetrator survey is: https://wh1.snapsurveys.com/s.asp?k=161822195409. It is essential that we avoid confusion by advertising too many surveys publicly at the same time. For this reason we propose we only share this survey via service’s who are already working with perpetrators. Our asks of you:

• Please share the survey internally within your service so that all frontline professionals can share this with their service users. The particular agencies that we think could send this to ‘individuals concerned about their behaviour in intimate or family relationships’ are: frontline children’s services teams, substance use services, police officers following an incident, probation officers and specialist DA services working with perpetrators.

For both surveys, we will send a weekly update on the number of responses to you all so we can monitor them continuously. If you would prefer to be removed from the weekly update, or nominate someone else in your service to receive them, please let us know.

Victim and survivor interviews

As discussed on Friday, we did not have the level of take up we wanted when we last worked with specialist services to identify victims and survivors to speak with us. We will re-approach service providers again to see if there are any that may be happy to engage with us this time, and will recirculate our engagement pack which outlines the process including consent forms. If we do not identify victims and survivors within the next 2 weeks, we will work with Local Authority SPOCs to identify victims through wider services such as children’s services. If we do not get take up from that after 1 week, we will email this group to escalate and ask for your support in terms of next steps.

Case audits

We still do not have the ISA’s we need back to make this feasible currently in the multi-agency way we had planned. As such our proposed approach will be to work with each Local Authority individually, working within your internal information governance processes, to conduct a case audit of 2 families that would work locally. This may mean we need to sign up to your data protection policies, or get consent from families, and may have to approach the audits slightly differently in each area. We have already met with Claire from Middlesbrough about how we might be able to do this there, and will meet with stakeholders in Stockton, Hartlepool and Redcar to decide on approaches there too. Our asks for this element will therefore be area specific and we will come back to you as a group if any further support is required.

TSAB Annual Consultation Survey – We want to hear from you!

Thank you all again for being so open in the way you have worked with us.

16 – 25 Year Olds – Transition, Choices and Support – Your Opinion Matters Survey

We try to look at gaps in provision post diagnosis for young people 16+ with autism.  We have spoken to some young people but would like to hear the voices of more.
 
There is a QR Code attached below  for a survey that has been developed in partnership with young people.  Our ask is please can you assist by circulating to your 16+ provisions and ask if they could please encourage their young people to participate.
 
We are cascading through LA’s, Healthwatch, VSCE organisations, Parent Carer Forums and TEWV as well as promoting on our social media and through PCNs. Can we also ask that you put on your local offer?
 
If you experience any  problems, please contact us on 01642 745024 
 
Many thanks in advance for support with this.