The St Albans Community Strategy and its 20 project system were outlined at the St Albans Residents Association AGM on Tuesday night during a presentation by Jarrod Coburn from Resilience New Zealand.
It is based on the Newlands Model of community development, which Jarrod and others in the Draco Foundation developed in conjunction with the local residents association.
The projects are the culmination of nearly a year’s work in the St Albans area and involved surveys, consultations with the St Albans Residents Association management committee and a select group of residents and representatives called the Panel of Eight (Raylee Price from Rehua Marae, Carol Chen, representing the Migrant Society, Alex Taylor, St Albans News Youth reporter, Beck Eleven, Ngaire Button, Chris Mene, Paul Somerville and Lynn O’Keefe from Bailies)
There are four programme areas (each with a manager or champion) to cover:
- built
- services
- recreation
- strategic
A mentor will work alongside those managers to get the system set up and running and to assist with finding people with the right skills to get involved or up skill where necessary. Volunteers, rather than paid workers, will be responsible for these projects.
Under each of those four areas are listed five projects. They don’t need to be all done at once and they are not meant to usurp what is already being done in the community. Beautifying Edgeware Village might be looked after by an organisation that already exists. These projects are also similar to the areas identified in the council initiated St Albans conversations earlier this year.
Built projects include: public swimming pool, places for citizens to meet, socialise and learn together, safer roads and footpaths, beautifying Edgeware Village and improving Warrington shops
Services include enhanced information flow, assisting groups to find places to meet and run events, library services, community safety patrol, and Civil Defence/resilience
Recreation project areas include a River Park linking to sister suburbs, a community food production programme, youth driven arts events, community art and culture and a fitness trail around the outside of Malvern Park
Strategic projects include lobbying for a tram link to the central city, organising activities to uplift citizens, developing a sense of place, sustainable living options and improving housing stock.
Some or all of these will take their first steps in 2013. Some are small projects and others large. Some will require a lot of talking and others will be more hands on. Plenty of opportunities for community involvement.
Jarrod was at pains to emphasise that volunteers working on the projects would be the ones to make decisions about what happens. It is not meant to be a top down process and is not being driven by SARA or any other body. The only SARA involvement will be getting the programmes set up and assisting when funding applications need to be signed off.
This is just a first brief look at the 20 projects, succinctly summarised on a single sheet of paper. Jarrod made mention of a longer 40 page document behind this but it was not shown at the meeting. Watch out for this somewhere on the website. I have since been told via email “there is a report supporting the process that will be released onto the website in the near future.”
In the meantime, expressions of interest from volunteers with good people skills are welcomed by SARA, who will co-ordinate the projects, but it will be late in the year before anything gets underway. After all it says 2013 on the strategy.
Some personal comments follow below and a disclaimer that this does not represent the views of SARA, Resilience New Zealand or anyone else promoting the 20 projects:
At first glance this looks a bit hierarchical and bureaucratic and it could end up being a top down process if we are not careful. It does offer opportunities for people to be involved, supposedly without too many meetings.
However, before these projects are put into practice a lot more talking and consulting has to take place. And there will be more questions to ask and answer like how many people can get involved in a project -is there a pattern here, 4 programmes, 5 projects, 6 members? Can the projects be divided into sub projects e.g.: events and activities to uplift?
These are the impressions of one person, one with admittedly some scepticism about community projects, having seen projects and plans for St Albans being made and not being implemented properly or at all. I am a fan of Jarrod’s ” people who do the work make the decisions” idea as outlined (I forget the fancy word he used to describe this) and working on projects such as computers and the webpages as I have been on and off for 15.5 years.
St Albans has been at a low ebb in the past two years, following the loss of the community centre, an abrasive relationship between CCC and certain residents’ representatives, divisiveness in the community and invisibility in the eyes of CERA and it needs something positive to mend a broken community.
This strategy has a good chance of making a real difference to St Albans. If it is implemented as Jarrod intends, develops as the community members have the energy to undertake projects and as long as it does not retreat to a top down’ command and control’ model, it will go a long way towards helping rebuild community in St Albans.
Looking forward to some uplifting that doesn’t involve tectonic plates.
