Agenda item

ITEM - COMMUNITY HUB PROJECT UPDATE

To receive an update from Jesal Dhokia, Transformation Project Manager.

Minutes:

An update was provided by Jesal Dhokia, transformation project manager. Jesal Dhokia reported that she had worked with a number of organisations and communities across the borough during the first lockdown around covid response. The responses from the communities were looked at and a blueprint project was created initially in the Clewer and Dedworth area. This was based on the evidence from public health and how the community in the area was understood. Five sub-groups were created led by the borough’s housing association, these were Community empowerment, Community Safety, Physical Environment Health and well-being and Employment and skills. The main aim was to understand re engage with the communities based on engagement and communication and understand what their strengths were and really change the way that the borough worked with the communities on ground. For the sub-groups, local residents, local organisations and local councillors were invited. A project board was created which was led by an independent Chairman, Peter Hayley. This board was not a decision-making board but engage health and social care to communicate and work together. A steering group was also created for Clewer, Dedworth and Windsor area which was purely community led. The steering group was chaired by the Youth Engagement Service. The Youth Engagement Service already had fifteen community representatives steering the progress of the project. Five sub groups were invited to talk about what they felt needed to change in terms of the borough within that particular area and focus on the strengths of those communities. An example would be, when discussing physical environments, this led to an individual who was a local resident who had an interest in the local environment around planting trees and biodiversity. This was supported and the residents were helped to create a Company Interest Company and engage with other residents who have the same interest. The resident was assisted to access external funding too. Also conversations were had with resident organisations and councillors within the area to understand what their vision was around changing the way that the community led their specific projects. The community conversations were led by three organisations, the Yes Consortium, Community learning Adult skills service and Abri Housing.  From the conversations, twenty-seven projects had been identified that the residents wanted. Five projects had been taken forward based on those conversations. The external funding had been accessed to support the projects. The five projects were disadvantaged children in young peoples activities and a mini consortium had been created with the organisations and the local people who wanted to get involved. It had been possible to access £25,000 of external funding to support the youth consortium, to support children and young people at a disadvantage enabling them to access not just digital activities but as we move slowly into out of covid, to access activities in that area. The second area was employment and skills. There were a lot of residents that felt confused about looking for a job so the team were looking to bringing together all the information from the RBWM website for people to access all the information in one place. The third project was about sustainable transport and people and their bikes being stolen, so residents wanted a bike shed to safeguard their bikes. A partnership had been created with Maidenhead Cycle Hub and they were working with The Swan within Windsor to create and replicate the Maidenhead Cycle Hub activities within Windsor. Some external funding had been secured for this. The fourth area was the physical environment, mentioned earlier and the final project was the food distribution network. Many organisations had developed services to deliver food to vulnerable residents, especially as a covid response. However, the vulnerable residents did not know how to access the services. With the help of Councillor Carol Da Costa, a food network had been created within the area and all the food network organisations had come together to discuss how they could support as many residents within the area. The team had now started looking at Maidenhead.

 

The project board and steering group would remain the same and organisations and members would be invited to join the steering group. The five topic areas would remain the same, community empowerment, community safety and health environment, health and well being skills and employment and physical environment. The two organisations, the Yes Consortium and the Clas, Community, Learning, Adult Services, would come into Maidenhead and have discussions with as many organisations, residents and officers to understand what needed to be done around Maidenhead. The projects would be very different with Maidenhead as the was a very large BAME population within Maidenhead which the team were hoping to engage with around vaccinations and covid but also other projects going forward. A project under the health and wellbeing project had already been identified where twenty residents had been identified and £50000 of external funding had been secured. This project was to support residents who did not meet the adult social care criteria and threshold but were frequent users in hospital but wanted to be apart of their community and use their strengths to strengthen the community. The national wellbeing circle provider would be brought in to support the Maidenhead Magpies, the Maidenhead Mosque and any other organisation that wanted to get involved and create well-being circles for these 20 people within the community.

 

ACTION: Jesal Dhokia to send the Clewer and Dedworth report to members via the clerk.

 

Jesal Dhokia reminded all that they could still get involved in the Windsor projects and the Maidenhead ones too.

 

The Chairman thanked Jesal Dhokia and commented that so much had been achieved in lockdown. The Chairman asked if people with disabilities and housebound had been located in the Clewer and Dedworth area? Councillor Carole Da Costa responded that she was involved in running a community hub in West Windsor and the entire area was leafleted when the hub was set up at the beginning of Covid. Councillor Da Costa informed the Forum that she worked closely with Age Concern and the community wardens, who had a list of vulnerable adults and people with learning disabilities. The community wardens had been informing the hub when people needed additional support. Social services had also referred to the hub to support people who were not able to get out during covid. These opportunities allow the hub to work with residents to look at what the future would look like. The areas being looked at were the recovery of covid and how things move post covid.

Councillor Stimson addressed the Forum and informed them that the council were trying to pull together climate change and sustainability and also health and well being as they were all connected. The lessons learnt from the Clewer and Dedworth projects could be grown upon when moving to Maidenhead, with the experiences from the Disability and Inclusion Forum and the experience of Lisa Hughes.

 

Lisa Hughes commented that it was a really interesting project. Lisa Hughes commented that it was really important to consider the changes in the libraries and also things like day services for adults with disabilities, particularly learning disabilities as part of the joined up working in order to measure the outcomes clearly.

 

Lisa Hughes asked who made the decisions and were projects being prioritised according to scale and size across the different wards in the borough and was there a process of measuring outcomes to understand the impact that the projects were having. Finally, Lisa Hughes commented that the people hardest to reach were probably the ones that were not connected to the organisations already mentioned and that Councillor Da Costa’s approach was probably reaching more people.

 

Jesal Dhokia responding explaining that the project board made no decisions but had Optalis, AfC, CCG and a GP representative on that board. The steering group was the decision-making board and that had representatives of the community on there and the five sub-groups under that. The process of measuring outcomes with understanding how the organisations were working within the community and not creating red tape around those organisations. In terms of the hardest to reach, the CV list on the system called Leon had been used to be able to communicate with the clinically extremely vulnerable. These were communicated through the library services.

 

ACTION: To keep on agenda and invite Jesal Dhokia to next meeting to give an update on the projects.

 

Councillor Rayner commented that Covid had given the council the opportunity to join the dots. The library service had called lots of residents and had done an excellent job of reaching the most vulnerable.