Tackling inequalities through a collaborative approach
Improving how we work with residents and communities
The Council’s engagement platform “Let’s Talk Coventry” has enabled us over the last three years to generate better connectivity and collaboration amongst local communities. This has been particularly useful in gaining insights from the public throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Hopefully now we have built a good relationship with local people this will continue to be shown via increased response rates to our numerous engagement opportunities.
The platform has improved our online engagement offer using a variety of deliberative tools as well as surveys. The graph below shows the continued increase in engagement with the platform.
Engaging local communities
In summer 2020, the Council launched a community-led engagement response to communications and messaging around COVID-19 that has seen the development of more than 320 community messengers across the city. They share information in the way they know works for their communities and neighbourhoods and provide feedback and intelligence about how it really feels on the ground in these extraordinary times.
Community messengers were recruited through existing faith, voluntary and community networks in the city. A series of webinars were held to provide initial advice and training and focus groups were held with young people to help develop specific messaging. A weekly news update is emailed to messengers to share with their networks. The email update is long and detailed, messengers pick and choose the items they would like to share.
One messenger creates a weekly email for her neighbours and rewrites the information we provide into her style. Weekly webinars provide a forum for sharing and discussions for the messengers. The network provides valuable feedback about what is really going on in neighbourhoods. They tell us about the latest false news and disinformation that is being shared on social media on things like the vaccine. It helps us make sure we are myth-busting when we need to.
Community and neighbourhood integration
A community and neighbourhood integration initiative is underway in Bell Green, Wood End & Henley Green area of the city. The council is working together with partners, through trusted relationships to understand and address the priorities and needs of residents and the community. This includes, enabling accessibility through co-locating services in community venues to provide immediate person-centred support, partnering with local school leaders to better enable them to help families and young people in need, supporting our most vulnerable residents through specialist advice in local grub hubs and targeted health and wellbeing initiatives. This will inform further locality approaches in other parts of the city in the coming months, where our focus will be on how we ensure that the work that we do, in partnership with others, has the most positive impact possible on the lives of local people.
Engagement with local stakeholder groups
The Council supports local community representatives to run several local community-based stakeholder groups based in the key neighbourhoods of the city. These were used virtually during the pandemic and now face to face to engage with community groups and organisations. These will also be consulted with for the new One Coventry Plan.
Monthly newsletter
As an additional engagement method, the Community Resilience team have created a monthly newsletter which goes to community groups and organisations across the city this includes very small community groups right up to those running large community centres. The newsletter was set up shortly after the end of COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns to continue getting valuable information out to groups in the sector but also to manage the many requests from service areas within the council and partners to get key information about service to the sector once services had resumed.
Meeting the public sector equality duty
The Council has continued at pace to deliver on its obligations under the Public Sector Equality Duty and advance the growth of its diversity and inclusion agenda more broadly. This year has seen the launch of a new set of Equality Objectives for 2022-2025; five objectives have been set which outline how the Council will meet requirements to eliminate unlawful discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between people of different groups.
The Council has also continued to assess the potential impact of key decisions through its Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) process. 26 EIAs were completed between April 2021 and March 2022. Another key highlight of the past year has been the Council’s success in applying for £120k of government funding to install 3 new Changing Places Toilets in the city.
Health and Wellbeing Awards
24 awards were given at the Treehouse Assembly Festival Gardens venue in September 2021 in celebration of everything great that happens in health and wellbeing services across the city. The event celebrated Coventry’s unsung community heroes, especially throughout the challenging times of COVID-19.