The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: imagining different communities and making them happen (Imagine)

Known as the Imagine project, this was a consortium of researchers across six universities and a diversity of council and non-governmental partners.

It was led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with University of Southampton, University of Sheffield, Durham University, University of Huddersfield and University of Brighton.

Researchers had studied how communities connect people, both today and in the past. These connections take many forms, but often included people coming together to seek change and pursue a different future. There had been investigations into the role imagination plays in how such futures are conceived and pursued.

As well as this, the history of people's involvement in community initiatives includes both successful innovation and frustration and disappointment, in the UK and elsewhere. This project aimed to learn from both scenarios. The study looked at connections in different types of community (some present, some past). Using this new knowledge, together the group imagined how communities might be different and experiment with different forms of community building.

Communities are made up of people who share some things in common, but also have differences. In the light of this researchers wanted to ask four main questions:
1) What are the best ways of conceptualising, researching and promoting connected communities so that they have the potential to accommodate and benefit from social, cultural and economic differences and diverse opinions and practices?
2) What does the history of civic engagement tell us about how and why the social, historical, cultural and democratic context matters to community-building?
3) What role can imagining better futures play in capturing and sustaining enthusiasm and momentum for change?
4) Is community research being transformed by developments in research methodologies, particularly the development of creative and collaborative methods?

The approach to these questions challenged ideas of community that focus on what is lacking, highlighting instead the role that harnessing imagination plays in shaping community futures. It brought together researchers from a range of disciplines across the social sciences and arts and humanities interested in community relationships together with partner organisations dedicated to community development in a range of locations. International colleagues added further dimensions to the consortium's activities, acting as keynote speakers at events, and as advisory committee members.

The projects employed a range of approaches to research, but with collaborative and participatory methods (community partners and universities working together) being central. Several projects involved going back to sites of previous research to explore what can be learned that is of relevance to to-day's debates about community. The return to sites of the Community Development Project of the late 1960s/early 1970s included analysis of background statistics, documentary records, interviews, oral history, community arts and other community-based activities, tracing that history and its legacies down to the present.

Researchers revisited culture and arts projects, and projects working with disadvantaged groups, all of which have sought to promote community resilience. Reflections on the lessons of these experiences fed into planned interventions with members of 'disadvantaged' communities to fire imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change.

Another project investigated what motivates volunteers to cross social and geographical boundaries, using mapping techniques, surveys and focus groups to capture these connections.

The context of this research was a strong impetus globally towards people looking for new ways to participate in decision-making about issues that affect their lives, and to participate in research that involves them - the so-called 'democratisation of social research'. The various strands of research were held together by the team's shared interests in how people envisage co-operating and how these ideas get put into practice in diverse communities. Answering these questions requires working collaboratively to look at a range of different cases, both past and present, and to draw appropriate conclusions to inform current debates and visions of the future.

Community relationships are at the heart of people's quality of life, and the promotion of active engagement in community processes has the potential to contribute to this, especially if these activities are inclusive and participatory. In working towards the achievement of this ideal, the consortium's approach emphasises the importance of learning from experience, both the knowledge of previous community development initiatives in the UK and lessons derived through engagement with international partners, who will each make extended visits to allow them to feed in across the consortium.

The public policy dimensions of these issues include examination of how community initiatives avoid the well-known pitfalls of 'top-down' processes, while the fact that diverse communities in the UK will be involved will allow direct engagement with the localism agenda. The fact that the consortium's work involved a programme that would unfold over five years means that projects later on in the schedule were able to build on the results of the earlier work, such as the engagement with the Participedia project on participatory politics.

Many communities are excluded from decision-making processes and are marginalised in relation to civic engagement and community participation.

The project sought to address these issues through a series of partnerships between local universities and non-academic communities of place, interest and identity.

These partnerships fostered discussions about the significance and meaning of working together, within and across communities. Everyone accepted that 'community' was difficult to define, but mostly we felt that the term symbolised a desire to live and work together for mutual benefit, rather than for the enrichment or accumulation of power by a few in society. Hence, 'community development', as a value-based process, which aims to address imbalances in power and bring about change founded on social justice, equality and inclusion, came to the fore as a way of understanding questions of civic engagement and participation in the communities in which we live and work. In particular, the notion of 'community development' underlined the importance of co-productive research as an embedded and relational approach, rather than as quick, instrumental process.

Our findings were drawn across four distinct work streams:

Brighton
In Brighton, our work set out to learn about and develop resilience based approaches with young people who face challenging life situations. Young people worked collectively to create a resilience toolkit - a resource of products and ideas for developing resilience e.g. One Step Forward, a guide developing by looked after children and Changing Lanes, a resource developed by young men with experience of the criminal justice system. The young people, in partnership with BoingBoing and the the University of Brighton School of Design, re-imagined the toolkit through the process of design.

This work and its findings demonstrated the importance of arts-based methodologies and partnership working to transform the ways that young people are supported in relation to their mental health.

Of particular significance was the role of poetry, both as a form of expression and as a mode of inquiry. We also developed the idea of 'Belonging Maps', which highlighted the significance of material resources and artefacts when working with diverse communities. This stream of work explored the structures of knowledge production and sharing that occurs within communities. Our findings have addressed the questions that are concerned with how communities can research their own histories and also what methodologies are best for doing that research.

The work of the Imagine project in Brighton directly contributed to the successful expansion of this work to Blackpool through securing a 10.4 million grant.

Tyneside
On Tyneside, community partners and academics from Durham University explored changing perspectives on civic engagement, with particular emphasis on community-based arts and heritage projects. A key finding was that People belonging to communities of place, identity and interest need to be able to reclaim their own histories. In one part of the Imagine project, a research team explored activities, achievements and legacies of the Community Development Projects (CDPs) of the 1970's in three areas: Benwell (Newcastle), North Shields and Hillfields (Coventry). The CDPs were part of an experimental Home Office anti-poverty programme, initiated in the late 1960s in 12 'deprived' neighbourhoods, adopting an action-research approach. The CDPs understood the value of historical research and importance of documenting 'hidden histories' of local working people to counter histories of the powerful. In Benwell, North Shields and Coventry today groups of local people are keen to write their own histories to challenge the stigma still associated with the areas, thus strengthening and empowering local community groups (see www.dur.ac.uk/socialjustice/imagine/). The work and its findings demonstrated the value of arts-based activities in promoting inter-generational learning, for example through graffiti art. It demonstrated the value of historical perspectives in re-evaluating the work of community organisations in their neighbourhoods today. It showed the potential for changing the practice of museums in response to community-initiated heritage projects.
In Rotherham, the community research team looked at ways of empowering women in local communities by drawing on research that focuses on cultures, histories and identities. The focus was on developing longer-term relationships and legacies which would contribute to community cohesion.
The work and its findings demonstrated that existing community knowledge (oral, intergenerational, historical and located in practice) must be recognised and valued. It showed the way in which history matters, for example the history of the Pakistani community and their contributions to British history, for example, the second world war, needs to be recovered and valued. Such processes of recognition and valuing can lead to individual and community enrichment, for example one group of women produced a book about their use herbal remedies, which has been used in school settings and which has led to several of the participants returning to continue their own education. The work stream pointed to the way in which community activism needs to be nurtured from where women are, existing structures are not always easy for women to access and local, small initiatives work best.

Huddersfield
In Huddersfield, community researchers worked with historians to contributions to historical knowledge and thinking. Arts and humanities co-production linked academic expertise and community experience to produce robust research whereby individuals developed skills for community development.
The work and its findings demonstrate that communities are able to articulate their own needs in a variety of outputs and forms, over which they have control. Often academics are already engaged with existing community activities - such as flourishing black history month events - and these partnerships enabled new forms of articulation. The work showed that the continuing underrepresentation of BME people in universities and other power structures can be mediated by coproduction to support skills for engagement. The work demonstrated the way in which co-production can become a dynamic gateway between grassroots activity and larger cultural institutions such as museums and galleries.


At the outset many groups were be identified that would benefit from this research. Most direct beneficiaries were the organisations outside of academia who have already agreed to collaborate with the projects in the consortium, including 37 whose letters of support are included in this application. Others had agreed verbally. Collectively these partners represent a very wide range of organisations including museums and galleries, charities, and national organisations as well as local community-based organizations with established links to both community members and policy-makers. 

Several of the proposed projects involved re-visiting organisations involved in previous community-university partnerships (such as those in the SECC and Beacons programmes), and further broadening of the network of organizations benefitting from the research will occur through the programme of annual conferences and other dissemination events and through the use of the project website to reach out. 

In the commercial private sector, efforts were made to engage with architects and builders involved in community-building and regeneration, through invitations to the conference at which Cheshire will provide an international perspective. Similar invitations were targeted at public, voluntary and commercial sector organisations in relation to the conferences devoted to collaborative working, fostering historical imagination, democratic methods for researching communities, the sights and sounds of imagined community futures, and comparative perspectives on community development, all of which will be of interest to commercial organisations in the cultural sector. Beneficiaries also include individuals who do not necessarily have formal links to organisations. 

The consortium drew on the wealth of its members' experience of engaging the wider public through dissemination events and other activities.

These diverse groups would benefit in several ways. The most direct of these related to the outcomes of the projects that involve planned interventions to explore the potential of communities of practice to foster resilience and momentum for change among members of disadvantaged communities. 

Alongside these projects were others which also designed to promote active engagement in the process of thinking about different community futures and making them happen.