Working with others

Fundamental to the success of the community engagement approach in neighbourhood level engineering projects is working in partnership with other organisations .

There would be no Bottom-Up Infrastructure projects without the involvement of community, public sector and infrastructure organisations engaging at every level, from concept through to delivery and evaluation.

To ensure effective community participation local organisations can be key partners to recruit and support volunteers for data collection during consultation stages (whether that’s through surveys or workshops, such as the participants of three co-design workshops in the Engineering Comes Home project) or being active agents in implementing change, such as the volunteer gardeners in the Energy Garden project.

Local resident organisations and influences, for example, can also be key channels to share information and communications about the stages of the project.

Additionally, in order to make things happen, partner organisations are often essential to have on board. For Energy Garden, there would have been no implementation without the input and support from London Overground station managers, nor approval for the build of solar power sources without sign off from Transport for London.

Technical design aspects may draw on bespoke tools developed by third party partners, such as the Leathermarket Kipling rooftop garden calculator.

Further partners might also include organisations such as schools, to roll out education and ongoing sustainability phases.

And of course, there would be no projects at all without project managing and funding organisations. Smaller projects may be part of larger scale programmes of work. A significant part of the success of delivery across all projects using the Bottom-Up Infrastructure approach has been generated by effective partnership working.

The success of partnership working should of course be a cornerstone of the evaluation approach.