The Berwick Project
Northumberland County Council aims to deliver
great service - first time round, every time.
The Berwick Project is a series of pilot
projects where we’re working closely with local communities to find
the best way to deliver services to meet their needs.
How the Berwick Pilot Projects will work:
We’ll be working with local people to use
their knowledge of what’s needed so we can identify opportunities
to improve how we provide services.
We hope to develop and deliver services that
prevent problems, rather than dealing with problems once they’ve
happened.
Our aim is to provide evidence to support this
as the best way of delivering services throughout the county - so
local people have local services tailored to their needs.
The Projects
1. Families Together
The Families Together pilot seeks to identify
households that might need extra help before they develop more
serious or complex needs.
We plan to provide support that will help
families and reduce the risk of serious needs developing, thereby
reducing the future demand on public services.
Volunteer Family Mentoring
Scheme
A workshop we held with 26 organisations and
services that work in the Berwick area (including police, health,
fire, schools and voluntary organisations) showed us that improved
family support is critical and that additional support may be
required for issues including housing, debt and alcohol misuse.
We’re proposing a volunteer family mentoring scheme in Berwick to
help with these potential issues.
The Place2Be
Children today have all sorts of worries from
friendships to bereavement, domestic violence, gang culture or
crime. The Place2Be is a school-based counselling service,
dedicated to improving the emotional wellbeing of children, their
families and the whole school community.
The Place2be are working with us in Prior Park
and Spittal first schools.
By supporting children early on we give them
the chance to grow up with prospects rather than problems.
2. Team Three Fields
Team Three Fields brings together council
departments, partner organisations and local people in a pilot
scheme to find new ways to deliver services for the Three Fields
estates of Highfield, Newfield and Westfield.
The Team, which will include local residents
and the local workforce, as well as the County Council, Berwick
Town Council, and Berwick Borough Housing, will be looking at ways
to make a better future for Three Fields.
The Three Fields Residents Association is
working with BRiC-work, a team of community development
specialists, and Northumberland County Council to find out what
people need and want from local services, and how services could be
delivered better to meet the needs of people living there.
The project aims to find out:
- Could services be delivered better and more efficiently by an
integrated multi-skilled workforce?
- Could the residents receiving these services help design and
commission them?
- Can we encourage local residents to become more involved in
taking care of their local environment?
- Can we help improve all of our services by making better use of
the local knowledge from our workforce?
If the project proves successful, we plan to
use this as a way to change the delivery of services throughout the
rest of Northumberland.
The intention is that Team Three Fields
will;
- Help residents to design and commission the services they
need
- Encourage residents to be more involved in taking
responsibility for their local environment
- Result in the delivery of the majority of services by a single,
integrated, multi-skilled team
BRiC-work will spend time talking to people
who live and work in Three Fields to find out what’s working well
and what could be done differently.
• BRiC-work
will help in negotiating a team agreement between local people and
the public agencies, who are all part of ‘Team Three Fields’
• The
agreement will set out the various responsibilities for everyone
involved: what local residents are responsible for doing, and what
are the responsibilities of agencies such as Northumberland County
Council, Berwick Town Council, Berwick Borough Housing, and the
police.
• By working
together, helping each other and by working as a team where
everyone does what they have agreed to do, Three Fields will become
better managed and maintained, offering a place to live which all
can enjoy and take pride in.
3. Social Intelligence
We aim to better deliver services by improving
our knowledge and understanding of communities and their needs.
Local Workforce
Intelligence
Our frontline workforce will be involved
throughout the review. Using information gathered from the local
workforce, we aim to influence the design and improve delivery of
all services to the community. This will include promoting the use
of the Council’s Intelligence Officer service - a confidential way
of reporting crime related and safeguarding issues. Other sources
of intelligence will include volunteer family mentors and community
street reps as well as frontline employees.
Social Capital Research
We hope to gain a deeper understanding of the
links between the different groups within the communities, with the
intention of encouraging people to work together and also
influencing how we and our partners can serve communities to
identify issues and solve problems.
