Pete Wilde

This book shares the experience of a four-year programme that was set up to explore how neighbourhood activity could best be supported. It follows the progress of 20 very different neighbourhood organisations across three countries to explore the opportunities and challenges of neighbourhood renewal from a community perspective. As well as testing out 'light touch' ways of offering support to community organisations, the report explores how different policies are working out on the ground; what it is realistic to expect of local residents and what needs to happen at agency level in order to address the 'implementation gap'. It will be valuable reading for policy makers and practitioners in the field of community engagement and neighbourhood renewal, as well as students and others who want an overview of how groups and organisations work at neighbourhood level in England, Scotland and Wales.

This report documents the results of road-testing two frameworks for assessing community participation: Active partners: Benchmarking community involvement in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000). The report examines whether the tools were useful, what worked most effectively and how the tools might be amalgamated on the basis of what was learned from the road-testing. The practical difficulties involved in using the tools were also explored. The lessons learned have enabled the production of a new companion handbook for development and assessment, Making community participation meaningful, which combines and develops the original frameworks.

This handbook is a companion volume to What works in assessing community participation? (The Policy Press, 2004) which documents the results of the road testing of two earlier frameworks for assessing community participation - Benchmarking community involvement in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000). Making community participation meaningful outlines key considerations that are necessary to ensure that community participation is effective; provides detailed sets of questions to enable stakeholders to assess the extent to which the indicators of success are being met; highlights a variety of resources which can be used by community groups to generate information and insight into the key issues and offers the real prospect of a commonly accepted assessment framework which has the authority to be adopted across sectors.