This website contains training resources, which explore the nature of capacity building in neighbourhood and community settings, collected from the development of training programmes and events, since 2002 in Leicestershire and the City of Leicester.
Almost all of the material is ‘home-grown’ – developed and written alongside the capacity building projects and work since 2000, when the Leicestershire Adult, Youth and Community Education Service launched a project called ‘Learning in the Community’.
In an OFSTED inspection of the Leicestershire Service in 2004, ‘Learning in the Community’ was the highest graded curriculum area and given ‘beacon’ status. The crucial characteristic of this version of capacity building and a strand running through the website’s collection of resources is that individual learning has always been seen as the process driving and shaping capacity building. The approach has always made the case for Individual Capacity Building and Personal Development, as essential pre-requisites to community capacity building and neighbourhood and community action, particularly where local people may be disadvantaged as non-confident learners.
The authors of the materials have continued to work in this field and even now are adding the latest resources to be developed, to this website collection. Over the last 10 years the ideas and materials have been used in a variety of settings, supported for a number of years by the ‘Leicestershire Learning Partnership and used to inform the development of a De Montfort University Foundation degree in Youth Work and Community Development.
Most recently, the ideas are being tested again in a project in the Voluntary and Community Sector, working within priority neighbourhoods, in Leicestershire – in the Borough of Hinckley and Bosworth, supported by a grant from the Peoples’ Health Trust Active Communities Fund, until September 2014.
The motivation to build and maintain this website is quite simple. Having a belief in the ideas and methods is reason enough to want them to be available, where they might contribute to improving capacity building practice within community development and neighbourhood action work, and the quality of people’s lives.
(paulpittham@ntlworld.com; April 2014)