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ICS services

Training to support professional development
Engaging and lobbying on community safety issues
Sharing community safety related information
Providing expert consultancy services
Regional forums

Events

A full schedule of events will shortly be published. If you are interested in joining the team of regional coordinators please contact us. We will be organising regional meetings to assist your professionalism

Testimonials

Community Safety teams attended the national conference in London.

The purpose of attending the event was to share best practice and make the most of networking opportunities. Talks of interest included Alcohol & Drugs, Community Safety Connect and Supporting Gang Affected Women & Girls.

Community Safety & Substance Misuse Group Manager and Community Safety Project Officer tweeted live from the event

Preventing violence: maybe communities know better

Community-based participatory research (CBPR), action research and bottom-up approaches – as known in the academic jargon – are not new. They are very popular in many fields. However, the way CBPR is practised still faces ethical challenges.

In most examples of CBPR, solutions are still driven by “outsiders”. They are the initiators of ideas and they use their own methods for building “inside capacity” – as if capacity didn’t already exist. Some might argue this is a form of microscopic recolonisation in which powerful experts make decisions that will ultimately affect communities.

Tensions between outsiders and insiders are common, which is reflected in low engagement and solutions with limited sustainability.

Would it be easier to prevent violence if we catalysed change from inside communities? Only if we talk in communities’ own language and learn to establish horizontal rather than top-down dialogues will this be possible. It is crucial that we remove “technicisms” that don’t allow true collaboration between outsiders and insiders.

Projects truly driven by communities are rare. Could this be the reason, after all these decades of research and public investment, that we haven’t had much success in preventing community violence? What do you think? Please share your views with us.

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