The Neighbourhood Project CIC
12b Otley Street
Skipton
North Yorkshire
BD23 1DZ
Westmorland and Furness
Craven
Bradford
Leeds
The mission statement of the Neighbourhood Project is 'to promote the sustainable environmental, social and economic well-being of neighbourhoods through self-help and community enterprise'. This reflects our philosophy that, in order for positive change to be long-lasting, it needs to be supported and owned by its beneficiaries.
In practice, we mainly deliver informal training sessions to raise people's awareness of their community rights and how they can contribute towards local regeneration (e.g. how to set up a neighbourhoood partnership, a community crime prevention project, local food growing, community-owned renewables, digital inclusion). We then support people to put ideas from our training into practice by offering coaching. This has resulted in a large number of spin-off projects and our website www.neighbourhoodproject.org.uk has further details including case studies.
We have also worked with residents to research their neighbourhood histories with a view to these being eventually written up and distributed in order to raise awareness.
Following a recent review of our business model, we are now moving towards a blended approach which means we will put some of our training online using platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, providing short videos for people who cannot attend our face-to-face sessions. We also aim to promote the identities of neighbourhoods through working with residents to create videos on their history and the stories of people who have lived in worked in our villages, neighbourhoods and towns.
Our aim is to use education as a tool to encourage active citizenship and resident-led regeneration.