Communities Building Capacity (CBC)

Commmunities Building Capacity

The vision is to create sustainable and cohesive digitally enabled communities which include those currently excluded. The solution involves creating a framework to support exchange between Community and Voluntary organisations, other partners and Local Authorities through a living lab approach to test proven practice in different contexts to demonstrate robustness. The aim is to demonstrate how brokers and champions can be fully supported by technology to build local capacity and service access .The outcome will be an ongoing network of effective practice exchange.

The projects were recently evaluated, to find out more follow this link.

Community Engagement - Engaging with communities lies at the core of this project. Following from the initial research into both Learning Communities and User Archetypes this project seeks to work with the ways in which members of communities seek to access services through friends and trusted agents and attempts to harness those social networks to facilitate wider service access through channels which are familiar to the user group.

The project is both iterative and responsive to the needs of the communities in which it will work. The process of engagement involves regular workshop activity and creates local steering groups with as wide a community representation as possible in partnership with service providers.

Aim - The project seeks to put people in touch with services at the local level but also to move people on so that they can become self serving and in turn can help others. People will demand the services that they want, to be delivered at the local level in a way that is appropriate to their life style and circumstances. Service providers will have more appropriate routes to market
based on the expressed needs of local people informed by local facilities.

To facilitate knowledge exchange and best practice transfer between community and voluntary organisations and Local Authorities.
- To create a support framework for best practice transfer.
- To highlight existing best practice in DC10.
- To distribute and publicise emerging learning materials in different formats
(online/offline, print, video...).
- To build a network of collaboration across authorities and organisations.
- To support implementation of best practice.
- To identify and align to existing core funding streams and attract additional
funding
- To identify and align to existing core funding streams and attract additional
funding
- To build local capacity in local communities through a living labs approach.

To find out more please email digital@birmingham.gov.uk.