“The time has passed when a few influential people could gather in a room to decide what a city will be. Instead, a city’s future is determined by hundreds of actions taken daily by thousands of people based on what they believe about a city’s future and their role in it.”
CAROL COLETTA, THE KRESGE FOUNDATION
Photo by mauro mora on Unsplash
The quote above eloquently sets out what Our Place has been about. People in neighbourhoods and communities in Wolverhampton believing that they have a leading role in deciding what their area and our City will become.
Our Place is all about encouraging people to find solutions working with the assets that we all have in our communities. Helping people and communities think about how we can play a part, collectively, to make change in our neighbourhoods. Using the Activate Pack and linking in with other resources in our great City of Wolverhampton, we have had inspiring discussions with over 100 people over about four months, running 10 events in 8 neighbourhoods. We looked at a vision of what you want life to be like in your community and then planned what small achievable steps we could take to work toward that vision. We ran sessions in the City centre, Whitmore Reans, Ashmore Park, Heath Town, Park Village, Bilston, Blakenhall and Warstones.
Although we don’t have Active Citizens funding to support this activity at the moment, we are hoping to move this work to a new level.
So a bit about the future…
I am pleased to say that WVSC will be working closely with colleagues from the City of Wolverhampton Council to host Make:Shift this year. We hope that many of you who came up with project ideas through the Our Place sessions, will come along and join in Make:Shift, inspire others with your stories and experiences and be inspired by others doing similar amazing things in their communities.
We will also be running some more Our Place sessions in the lead up to Make:Shift and into the future, so please look out for them in your area. If you have a group of people who would like to make change in their community, please let us know and we will be happy to come out and run a session with you.
If you would like to be inspired by some of the amazing things people are doing in their communities around the world, a good place to start is The Community Lover’s Guide website.
We have also been learning about Participatory City. If you haven’t heard of it, you can read all about it here. We would love Wolverhampton to become a ‘Participatory City’. But more of that another time.
So this is the last of the Our Place blogs for a while. Our Place will be supporting the Make:Shift blog over the next few months.
Finally, we would love to hear from you if you if you have any questions or ideas about participating in your neighbourhood in the City. Please get in touch.
Saffi Price
WVSC #OurPlace 