Our Projects > London Empowerment Partnership

‘Community Empowerment’ has begun to drown the vocabulary of those working in local government and the third sector, with many comparing it with the Performance Management Movement. Yet many of us are left wondering what all the fuss is about?

In many ways, community empowerment is the bread n’ butter of the voluntary and community sector. We work to ensure that people have a say in decisions that affect them, that democracy is more than casting a vote, that all voices are heard, and that the state serves its people. In doing so, we are working to the idea that democracy should be a participative process.

Empowerment is what happens when people feel able to get involved in their communities and make decisions about things that affect their lives. Local authorities, government departments, statutory agencies and voluntary and community organisations all play a part in supporting local people to make decisions about the services and activities available in their communities.

Empowering individuals and groups to shape their lives, such as influencing how local health services are run and delivered or what activities are offered in a community centre, ensures that those services are better tailored to the needs of the community. It has also been found that community empowerment leads to a more prosperous and equal society, and greater individual well-being.

In 2007 a Regional Empowerment Partnership (REP) was established in each of the nine English regions by the department of Communities and Local Government. Each REP aims to improve the quality and functioning of relationships between citizens and government, in order to increase people’s ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives. London Civic Forum was awarded lead responsibility for this programme in London.

The London Empowerment Partnership brings together a range of statutory agencies, third sector organisations, networks and people who are running community empowerment activities. We work to improve the quality, coordination and evidence of community empowerment across London.

Each year, we deliver a work programme to support agencies - such as Local Authorities - to make improvements in the way they deliver community empowerment mechanisms. Our activities include:

• case studies
• guidance and toolkits
• community-led evaluations
• regional and local pilots
• events, training and consultancy
• peer support and mentoring
• development of an interactive empowerment map
• impact assessments and quality assurance
• action learning sets and research projects
• targeted support
• information sharing and ebulletins

This project will be completed in March 2011, by which time we hope to have enabled substantial improvements in the way agencies engage with their constituents. We anticipate that this will increase the number of people that feel able to influence decisions.