Communitydialogue

Sinfin Funday Saturday 18th October 2008

  A combination of the usual favourites- a bouncy castle/bouncy slide,face and henna painting,food,music and dance workshops alongside the pulling power of some extremely dedicated local people and groups resulted in 4 hours of non stop fun.

Its estimated that over 1500 local people joined in on the day.

What did we learn from the day?

The results of the engagement activities provided us with a snapshot of the communities' priorities and what they felt would make a difference to peoples health. In addition to this hundreds of people found out about our commitment to improving people's health in the area and that we're ready to engage with local people at a level that suits them.

The majority of people interpreted health as being holistic. They felt that the things that had the most impact couldn't be defined as a service but instead as an activity or a change to something really simplistic like access to toilets on the local park or the creation of a space for young people in the area.The top three issues included young people,health and community activities.

How did we get this information?

We worked on keeping the activity interesting, relevant and quick so that the anticipated crowd could all access the activity.

We asked them to tell us their Make  A  Difference ideas ..!!!

At the start of the "Make a difference" challenge individuals, families and groups were invited to have their picture taken. This helped with capturing attendance, the demography of the people who participated on the day and created an opportunity to start a conversation with people. The pictures were added to a display titled "People who can Make A Difference". In total 109 people were photographed on the day.

The visual image of a community who can "make a difference" did attract attention. A number of groups and families responded well to the idea of having their photograph taken.

People were encouraged to look at the background information and respond to the question - What do you think would make a difference to your health and the health of your community? Their ideas were noted on brightly coloured cards and displayed next to the portfolio of "People who can make a difference".

In total 196 comments were recorded on the challenge activity.Some comments were given freely without deliberation. Others involved more prompts and explanations about what "health" means to different people. In such cases we explained our intention to develop improved services that will impact on people's health and asked people to think about what that service might look like for them.

When all comments are sectioned into themes it's clear that participants prioritise work with young people, future events and activities and health.

Conversations with a number of people were extremely detailed, with eight people consenting to being videoed whilst discussing their thoughts on what would make a difference locally.

Realising the limitations of the space given to the activity a member of the engagement team and a local volunteer worked on a detached basis, moving around the various activities and the surrounding area of the event encouraging people to take part in the activity.

For those people who didn't feel like talking we created - Your Space: no names - just your thoughts

We thought of using a book where local people could write down their comments without having to leave their name as people don't always like to be identified. 'Your Space' was a play on words using 'My Space', which is web based social networking site. The 'Your Space' book can be taken to future events to build up a portfolio of comments from local people.

Next steps

The community is ready to work with health on future service developments.

These developments might not be traditional solutions or those that have an evidence base but people are willing to work with us on improving things in the future. As a result of the engagement activity we now have a list of individual's names who have expressed an interest in remaining involved/informed of any future work.The next step is to meet with these interested indivduals at a preplanned Community events/activities meeting on the 6^th November - The aim of this meeting will be to identify and plan future events/activities within the community. The meeting was promoted at the event and will hopefully help to continue the momentum that Sinfin Fun day 18^th October 2008 kick started!

Meeting notes, 24th June 2008

Sinfin has 10% more under 15's than the rest of Derby but very little available to soak up their energy, not surprising then that under-age drinking and anti-social behaviour is creeping up the agenda of the Community Safety Partnership.

Our discussion started here, we felt we wanted something that had broad appeal, that might create the right kind of "social energy" and could raise Sinfin's profile. Ten years ago was the heyday of the Sinfin Carnival, it doesn't exist now but the people are around that helped organise it, it exists (fondly) in people's memories and it's big and audacious.

We also talked about ASDA's role in the area, the way they were held to be at least partly responsible for the way the precinct is starting to feel under-developed. We believe that many of the shops there are owned by ASDA and we'd like to explore using one of them as a local hub - a place where we can engage with the community over a longer period.

Talk of ASDA made some of us think about the importance of brand. We speculated on what Sinfin's brand might be - what do people think of when they think of Sinfin? After a while we realised that the area is known for the number of young families, born out by the numbers of kids in the area that we mentioned earlier. Young families - the issues they face, their joys and sadnesses, starting out, learning and changing - all of these things are great aspects of early life and parenting. If we needed a theme for a carnival, and one that fitted with Sinfin now, well maybe this was it!