Building Sustainable Communities through community action

Scrutiny Councillors are looking at building sustainable communities through developing community action.  Councillors are focusing specifically on how the council can best support residents to run some services in their own communities.

Councillors have chosen to look at this subject because:

• In order to maintain important local services the council will need to be a radical in looking at different ways of delivering them.   A partnership with local communities will offer a solution to keeping certain services running.  The term community action has been used to explain some of this activity.
• We need to build and support sustainable communities because this will result in better outcomes for people and reduce the cost of services.
• Current models of service delivery are unsustainable an d not always providing the best outcomes for people.
• We need to build strong, empowered and cohesive communities which can bring people together, influence decision making and lead on community action, therefore taking more responsibility for community initiatives and issues.

Scrutiny Councillors have so far as part of this piece of work:

• looked at the transformation fund and how the project is connecting with the poverty agenda
• how the Council are preparing for and currently dealing with the legal aspects of community action
• met with community connectors, local area co-ordinators and Swansea Council for Voluntary Services, staff from Communities First
• completed a survey available to the public, councillors and community organisations

The Panel now plan to:

• 14 April – Meet with representatives from Community Centres across Swansea
• 14 April – Meet with the Head of Corporate Property Services
• 27 April – Look at desk based research on good practice examples
• 27 April – Look at the survey responses
• June – Draw together their findings and write a report to Cabinet making recommendations for improvement

If you would like to contribute to this inquiry you can do so by emailing us at scrutiny@swansea.gov.uk