Midway through the seven-year Single Regeneration Budget funded Renewal Project (April 2001), the Residents' Association has achieved physical improvements for the area including upgraded lighting, renovated roadside frontages, tree-planting and traffic safety measures, speeded up by the formation of a Resident's Action Groups (RAGs) on these and other priority issues. A Community Centre is about to be set up.

Other objectives for this built-up area remain elusive, notably acquiring land for a play site and a patch of wilderness as a wild life reserve. There have been frustrations and misunderstandings to overcome:  project management, Council officers and Residents' Associations (RA's) starting from scratch have all had to learn what is involved in an unfamiliar set-up in which residents, not Council, are required to determine how the environmental budget should be used (to a spend-in-the-year-or-lose-it timetable).  Positive achievements have been the merger of two over-stretched RAs, a well conceived and analysed questionnaire to identify residents' priority issues and requirements which led to setting up the RAGs,  drawing in otherwise uninvolved residents interested in achieving specific goals. 

We will be glad to share our experience with local groups on 

• questionnaires and their analysis

• organising Residents' Action Groups

• teething problems in a Renewal Area

• disabled requirements and provisions

Jenny Hunter, Phone: 01424 443333,    Fax: 01424 436807,
E-mail: jenny@jha1.com