Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Community Engagement Seminar

Workshop 3

Building Trust: Building Bridges

Lorraine Briscoe, Community Consultant & Aston Pride board & Doreen Bailey, Crown Prosecution Service

The workshop leaders gave a brief overview of the problems experienced by the community they worked in and problems encountered with funding agencies. They put forward key issues to tackle in order to build trust with the community. This workshop used role-play exercises to consider responses to real-life experience. Volunteers were given scenarios from actual situations and asked to consider what expertise from their work place they could bring to help resolve the issues portrayed.

To give a flavour of the workshop, a selection of the scenarios and responses discussed are given below.

• A single parent family with three sons - the father is drinking too much and the eldest son is starting to get involved in crime.
  The father lacks support, hope and solutions and needs support from the community at all levels. He needs help to improve his parenting skills. It would be useful to ask him what he needs - an advocate to speak for him and to help him use the advice offered. Information is needed from the community - perhaps from the GP, a library, informal networks that have skills to assist.
  
  

• Unemployed parents with two children who have been beaten up and are bullied both in and out of school.
  Solutions and support from the school, GP, police, advocate, community centres, law centre, extended family networks, home visits. The children may benefit from training in assertiveness skills, careers, interview skills, measures to cope with bullying.
  
  

• An outreach worker for a small community group: no funding, only open two nights a week. The outreach worker is not good at filling in forms.
  The outreach worker needs help with financial skills and someone from the group needs to take on the responsibility for securing a bid for funding. Long term change is needed together with support from the top and other agencies.
  
  

• Teacher at a local school is told by a pupil that if the pupil does not sell drugs, his sister will be raped.
  School workshops and a strong action plan for the school and all students. Regular searching for drugs, police searches with dogs, protection for individuals. An annual plan for police and youth involvement. Community support to show that drugs are not acceptable and assistance from outside in the form of Crimestoppers, Youth Workers etc.

Download the PowerPoint presentation 74 Kb

Last update: 31 March 2004