THE LOZELLS AND NEWTOWN YEF COMMUNITY RESEARCH PROJECT
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) aims to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence, by finding out what works, for whom and why. The Neighbourhood Fund is one of the programmes that YEF is funding. It’s aim is to understand if and how empowering people to make decisions about their local neighbourhoods prevents children from becoming involved in violence.
BVSC Research and their partners University of Birmingham and University of Wolverhampton, were commissioned to undertake community research and co-design activity. This activity sat across three phases, Feasibility, Discovery and Co-Design. The first phase saw Lozells and Newtown identified as the ‘hyperlocal’ area of focus for the Neighbourhood Fund. This report sets out the findings from the second phase, the Discovery Phase.
The Discovery phase was led by the University of Birmingham, employing the Use-It model of Community Research. The research focused on exploring the ideas of local people in relation to the needs of the area and potential solutions. The aim was to seek the views of individuals from the
community who would not usually have a voice. To achieve this, the University of Birmingham recruited 29 individuals who live and work in Lozells and Newtown and provided accredited community research
training. 13 individuals went forward to complete 38 interviews with individuals from the area.
Interviewees came from a range of different communities and included individuals who had personal experience of youth violence, having been victims of violence, spent time in prison, witnessed the aftermath of stabbings, experienced police brutality and lost close friends to knife and gun crime.
Read more in the PDF below.
