Active Partners - Community Engagement in Regeneration

Withernsea & Southern Holderness Regeneration Partnership

Active Partners was formed in 1998 after concern at the lack of involvement of local communities in community regeneration. A group of regional bodies, including Regional Development Agency; Yorkshire Forward, the Churches Regional Commission, Yorkshire and the Humber Regional Forum and Yorkshire and Humber Assembly agreed that creating "Benchmarks" would be a means of measuring the effectiveness of community involvement. Now with over 250 member organisations, the Active Partners Unit promotes best practice in community involvement by supporting initiatives to use the benchmarks and sharing learning regionally through events and resources.

Regeneration is about tackling the various forms of deprivation caused by low income, worklessness, poor health, lack of skills and poor living environments. Often this involves a complex web of activity to improve the social, physical and economic environment for communities, from making public services more accessible, to building better quality housing, to creating more and better paid jobs.

The most effective regeneration occurs as a result of 'partnerships' of agencies coming together to pool resources and ideas about how to improve an area. Partnerships often include local authorities, volunteers from the community, health, police and local business. But each partner brings different interests, concerns and agendas to the table. Best practice in regeneration is about ensuring that all partners contribute to regeneration planning on an equal basis. This means valuing unpaid staff such as community partners just as much as other 'paid staff'. It means allowing each partners to contribute their needs and issues equally. It means that community members who volunteer their time aren't out of pocket because of their efforts.

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