ADAB's link to Big Society

ADAB aims to provide communities with:

• Access – to policing or community safety services
• Influence – over community safety priorities in neighbourhood
• Interventions – joint action with communities and partners to solve problems
• Answers – sustainable solutions to problems and feedback on results

ADAB’s commitment to the Big society is one where:

• There is a clearly defined and widely shared sense of the contribution of different individuals and different communities to a future vision for a neighbourhood, city, region or country
• There is a strong sense of an individual’s rights and responsibilities when living in a particular place – people know what everyone expects of them and what they can expect in return
• Those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities, access to services and treatment
• There is a strong sense of trust in institutions locally to act fairly in arbitrating between different interests and for their role and justifications to be subject to public scrutiny
• There is a strong recognition of the contribution of both those who have newly arrived and those who already have deep attachments to a particular place, with a focus on what they have in common
• There are strong and positive relationships between people from different backgrounds in the workplace, in schools and other institutions within neighbourhoods.

Integration

Big Society is the responsibility of all local partners in the public, voluntary and business sectors and it is about creating attractive, prosperous, vibrant, safe and strong communities where people want to live, work and do business.

Influence

Priorities in our neighbourhood to be effective, requires the need of the communities to be involved in identifying local issues and being involved in the priority setting process.

Local Governments, as far as possible, ensure that all sections of the community are provided with the opportunity to influence local priorities. This must include the involvement of partner agencies working together to resolve community priorities and improve outcomes for individuals, new and emerging communities and host communities.

Community engagement

Our approach to Community engagement is a process that provides the public and communities with the opportunity to participate at their chosen level in decision making processes that influence policy.

Engagement can be broken down into four different types:

• Information gathering – capturing public attitudes through surveys etc.
• Consultation – people brought together to represent the demographics of a community to discuss particular issues or policies
• Participation – ongoing dialogue with the community, LA and the police on a range of issue
• Feedback – ongoing process to explain action taken following consultation and engagement Effective engagement is core to the success of localities and to help build trust and confidence between the Authorities, communities and new and emerging communities..
• Contributing factors towards The Big society:
• Geographical information of the community (boundary, size, population)
• Demographic information (age groups)
• Interest groups (parents, Women, young people,)
• Communities of interest (service users, faith communities, BME communities, LGBT communities)
• Stakeholders (business, local authority, partner organisations)