Letter to the Walthamstow Yahoo Group in response to a story about the latest review of Community Councils.
I was interested to read your account (June 30) of the latest review of Community Councils (CCs). Reviews are important: we need to track whether the resources and effort invested are delivering value to residents. My own view is that CCs are delivering solid value, and in a unique way.
I managed to live here for 15 years without feeling I had any real contact with “community life”. When CCs were first proposed, I saw this as an opportunity to find out what was going on, to find out what my “neighbours” thought, and maybe to play some part. Since then I’ve witnessed an astonishing range of debates, presentations, questions, answers, votes and the occasional noisy outburst.
In our patch (Walthamstow West) we’ve installed new litterbins, provided new scooters for ShopMobility, laid on supervised sports sessions for young people, built a new climbing frame in Lloyd Park and made a grant to a night-shelter (among other things). We’ve discussed schools, health-care, road-safety, parking, regeneration, crime – you name it. People ask questions and get informed answers, and listen to each other. It works, and it’s open to anyone in the wards concerned to raise anything with a local impact.
One challenge is to embrace communities potentially “hard-to-reach”. It’s true that the articulate and the already-committed are making good use of CCs, but “ordinary” folk are there too, and aren’t being ignored. The top priority for the Chairs is to make sure that everyone has an equal chance to have their say. We are actively looking at how we can be more welcoming to those of our neighbours who may not want to speak, or for whom English is a secondary language. We’re learning, and getting more effective all the time.
CCs offer a quite unique opportunity to meet face to face with Councillors, officers and neighbours, to hear and to be heard. If they were to be discontinued, wouldn’t everyone be harder-to-reach?
Philip Herlihy
Community Chair,
Walthamstow West Community Council