Brighton and Hove rocks

The Health Authority for East Sussex, Brighton & Hove, UK approached the Scarman Trust to take on the coordination for involving the community in identifying priorities for Brighton & Hove. The Trust's mission is about enabling people at the grassroots to have a voice in shaping policy on a local, regional and national level, by getting people’s issues on the table in a proactive way. They believe that statutory authorities should be responding to the needs of local communities, rather than local communities responding to statutory authorities’ need to consult, which very often just means ticking a box and saying, ‘we’ve consulted’ and then they do what they were going to do anyway. The Trust agreed to coordinate this and set it up as a process which would ensure that as an outcome, the maximum number of initiatives that were suggested by the community would actually be implemented. They ran a series of workshops using video cameras, an interactive website, and theatre. The article describes these events and looks at the recommendations that were taken forward and the lessons learnt.