URBAN GREEN NEWCASTLE
Urban green spaces are a core part of city life, they are essential for reaching health and well-being, social, economic and environmental goals; therefore should be looked after. Urban Green are the charity responsible for looking after Newcastle's 33 parks and 61 allotments, and its surrounding community.
Involving Communities in Decision-Making on Parks
Why are communities such a big involvement in green spaces?
WHAT HAS BEEN CREATED?
A community engagement toolkit has been created in partnership with Northumbria University Newcastle. A digital version of the toolkit has been created for easy access for the UGN staff to be able to utilise at community events.
WHY HAS IT BEEN MADE?
The toolkit was made in response to the lack of funding green spaces face in the UK's urban green areas. It has the aim of building trust and connectedness with communities, to engage them in the future of urban green spaces.
WHO IS IT FOR?
The toolkit is for the usage of Urban Green Newcastle's staff members to be able to, not only use, but also add ideas too in the future; with the aim of sharing it with other organisations to better enrich communities nationwide.
WHERE WILL IT BE USED?
The toolkits will be used at any community events the charity may hold, whether they be private or public. The toolkit can also be used by the staff to tackle any internal hurdles or to generate any initial ideas before sharing them with the communities.
What have UGN been facing?
Urban parks are facing a crisis. Budgets have been substantially cut, staff have been lost and many parks are suffering from a lack of investment due to austerity measures. In Newcastle, the parks' 2017/18 budget was cut by over 90 per cent from that in 2010/11. As a result, new innovative ways have been sought to provide and manage parks. This has resulted in a somewhat innovative transfer of the management and delivery of parks from the local authority to a relatively independent charity, Urban Green Newcastle. While this was seen to secure the future of Newcastle’s parks, concerns among public and community groups have been expressed over how communities and residents will be involved in decision-making, over perceptions of a loss of democratic accountability and over the commercialisation of parks.
Why is community engagement the answer?
UGN collaborated with Northumbria University to produce a Community Engagement Toolkit, which is digitised for the usage of the UGN's staff, who want to engage members of the public, organisations and community groups in decision-making.
Our long-term goals have been to enable the public, park users and other stakeholders to feel more directly connected to decision-making in Newcastle’s parks, and to help to build trust and closer relationships between UGN, the public and other stakeholders. In order to do this, we developed the project into several strands.
One strand was a literature review. The goal here was to develop increased awareness and understanding of innovations and new methods for participation, and to tease out any issues and identify good practice.
The next was the creation of a toolkit.
Another strand was the development and delivery of workshops to test out selected methods of engagement, which would further inform the report. The workshops were intended to establish who, why, when and how to involve communities, and how best to provide feedback to them from the perspectives of various stakeholders.
This work all functioned to inform the toolkit for use by UGN and other organisations in the future.