Citizenship

What is Active Citizenship?

In 2006, ARK got three years of funding from the Big Lottery to build on the excellent work of our nine-month pilot project to help people have a voice about issues that concern them in their local community and elsewhere. For more information about what we have done so far, please see the Background section of the site.

This ‘Promoting Active Citizenship’ project supported even more people to get involved in their local communities, make new relationships and enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.

Citizenship is about everyone having certain rights and responsibilities. It is about how we put our rights and responsibilities into practice. Anyone who wants to can be actively involved in their community. Everyone could take part in groups and attend meetings to have their say and influence how decisions are made.

Everyone’s voice as a citizen matters because these decisions often affect your life and your community. Citizens must feel they can make a difference and have some control over their lives. Having the confidence to speak up and say what you think is an important part of being a citizen!

Through the money we have been given by the Big Lottery, we employed a worker to take forward the main aims of our project:

• That people with learning difficulties are better equipped to represent themselves, take control of their lives and be involved in their communities.
• That there are improved social networks for people with learning difficulties, resulting in reduced isolation.
• That there are greater opportunities for training and employment for people with learning difficulties

We have been doing a lot of things to promote active citizenship:

• Supporting people to speak up about issues of concern in their support services, tenancies and local communities
• Supporting people to explore their right to be safe and not be harassed and what action they can take about harassment.
• Supporting people in choosing new staff
• Supporting people to be involved in induction training for new staff.
• Supporting the people we offer a service to and staff to focus on employment opportunities.
• Supporting people to speak at workshops about how they are seeking to influence change in their community
• Delivering training in ‘Understanding Citizenship’ to both staff and to the people we support. We have a training pack called ‘Taking Action and Making a Difference in your local community’ which has some useful training material in it. This can be purchased from us for £25 including postage.
• Producing newsletters with examples of what the people we support have been doing, as well as a newsletter about barriers to, and good examples of, effective participation. Please see our News section for copies of these.
• Facilitating the development of circles of support.
• Organising meetings with people from Community Planning so that the people we support hear abut what is going on in their area and Community Planning people hear about what concerns the people we support.

These are just some of the things we have been doing and there is a lot more information about the work of the project in this section of our website.

The Promoting Active Citizenship project has now come to an end, but ARK has employed a full-time, permanent Tenant and Service User Participation Officer, whose role will be to build on and develop the good work which was started by the Project, and other ARK initiatives. For more information about the Tenant and Service User Participation Officer, please see the Tenant and Service User Participation Officer section of the site.

We are very keen to hear from other people about any work that is going on so please get in touch and share your stories with us. We are also keen to hear your views about this section of the website.