How can we work with residents to understand how people across the local area are tackling issues?

In my previous posts on how we can help people improve their understanding of the area to improve collaboration in improving outcomes, I’ve focused on helping services identify opportunities to influence positive behaviour and understanding the challenges & opportunities to develop neighbourhood-based solutions. In this post, I’m focusing on working with residents to understand how people across the local area is tackling issues.

As a council, we report how we are delivering through our Corporate Delivery Plan, Outcomes Framework performance and council-facilitated community activity from our platform Newham Co-Create, as well as our community assemblies. I’ve blogged before about the resident insight we have and you can see some examples below. However, we don’t have connected ways of seeing what residents and local organisations are doing to improve our local area, which is often not initiated by the council.

We will be using the qualitative & quantitative insights, engagement with services, partners & residents, to:

• Show how services, partners & residents are tackling issues on key outcome areas
• Use the different insights to tell a story on everyone doing their bit to improve the boroughs
• Use data visualisation & narrative to mobilise residents for future action

To do this, we will:

• Discover the different data & insights that show what the council has done to achieve the outcomes in Towards a Better Newham
• Create ways for partners and residents to share what they have done to achieve outcomes in Towards a Better Newham
• Visualise the different insights in a way that shows how everyone is doing their bit to improve the borough on those outcomes in a collective way
• Design a process on how services, partners & residents could engage in reviewing their collective activity to achieving those outcomes and what could be done better and next together
• Test out the design process with services, residents & partners in a specific neighbourhood/outcome area