How we know what our community wants
425 NMS residents took part in a series of community consultations between May 2019 and July 2020. This enabled us to indentify the community’s top priorities which informed our new partnership plan for the period 2021-2022. These periorities are (in decending order):
- teenage/youth activities
- more kids’ activities
- refuse collection
See below a breakdown of our findings
Activities Survey
Level 1 – with 14% of the ‘vote’
- More things for teenagers/youth including a youth club, music studio, skate park
Level 2 – each with 8% of the ‘vote’
- More activities for kids including the holidays
- More frequent refuse collections/litter cleaning
Level 3 – each with 4-5% of the ‘vote’
- Singing/music/recording studio
- More events/fun days
- Keep fit activity for adults that isn’t chair based, including tea dances for older people
- Football
- Family dance e.g. Bollywood
- Park warden/keeper/security
- More police visibly patrolling and building up relationships
Level 4 – each with 3% of the ‘vote’
- Arts & crafts
- Family cookery classes
- East Road bus service to/from the High Road and Queens Hospital
- Toilets in the park
- Activities for under 5s
Focus Groups
34 people took part in focus groups carried by our guest researcher which highlighted the following issues:
- Not feeling safe on the streets, particularly at night – despite the overall crime rate in the North Meets South area being lower than the borough average. This was often stated in conjunction with a lack of activities for young people/young adults
- Isolation, particularly of older people
- Mental health problems
- Lack of an indoor gym
- A need for a central point of information where people can find out about housing, benefits etc. as well as the activities in the area
We will continue to work with the council and other agencies around issues like refuse collection, policing and health care.
