Working with the public, vulnerable people and their relatives in their local communities is an important dimension of our work.
Traditionally, care and support services for vulnerable people are planned around client groups. This is in contrast to housing and regeneration where services are more often planned around the communities where people live.
In addition, the experience of regeneration and neighbourhood renewal, where local people and communities are directly engaged in identifying their issues and priorities and planning for the future health and well-being of their communities, has rarely been translated into working with vulnerable and socially excluded people.
We have considerable experience of using community development and participatory approaches to work directly with local communities to plan for the future health and well-being, for example, of older people in an area. In this work we have adopted a citizen rather than service user focused approach.
We have used this approach to build local older people’s partnerships in areas as different as Liverpool and Devon.