Changemakers: Addressing local needs and growing community resilience

Brenda Lines, chair of Big Local DY10 in the West Midlands, wants to make one thing clear at the outset: “I am certainly not a hero and I don’t want to be considered as one.”

Brenda has lived in the Broadwater and Greenhill area of Kidderminster in Worcestershire for 37 years, in which time she has served as deputy head of a large secondary school and the head teacher at a pupil referral unit.

She describes herself variously as “a networker”, “a strategist” and “an opportunist”, skills she has brought to her role as chair of Big Local DY10 since 2013.

In addition to the time each week she volunteers as part of the Big Local programme, she is a grandmother of nine and serves on the board of governors for a large special school in Kidderminster.

We’ve always had the view that only the people who live in the community know what the community needs.”

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your area? 

Brenda: It’s very diverse. There are three very distinct areas. The Horsefair was identified some years ago as an area of highest need.

The Broadwaters, which is mainly the Sion Hill community, has been identified as one of the areas of greatest unemployment in the West Midlands. So there’s a lot of unemployed people who live up there.

Greenhill is a real mixture. It’s got one or two pockets of what I would call deprivation, but it’s also got some high-end, middle class housing as well. It’s a real mixed bag.

Q: What needs did you identify that needed to be met in those areas? 

Brenda: We don’t really have that approach. Our partnership is very strategic. We pay other people to do stuff. We’ve always had the view that only the people who live in the community know what the community needs.

We have done a lot of consultations over the years with the local community to gauge what it is they feel that they need, not what we think they need. Consultations are really good. You can have a hypothesis at the beginning and then you can be quite surprised.

One of the Big Local initiatives was the ‘measuring change’ project. We were able to work with The Young Foundation and they helped us with the consultation. We don’t think we’re experts. We’re always looking for other people to be our experts, if you like. I think that’s one of our strengths.

Q: How does this difference in approach manifest itself? 

Brenda: What we’ve been doing over the years is growing other community groups. In a way we’re like a little Big Local with the partnership in the centre and then these community groups around it.

They’re the ones that do the work. They’re the ones that put in money to do things. We’re the strategic group that dishes out the money. We have spent a lot of money on grants. We don’t have any buildings. We commission all our work out.

By the end of our Big Local plan, we’ll probably have given Home-Start about £125,000, almost 10 percent of our money. They run family support services in our area, targeting vulnerable families that live here.

Q: What’s the process for providing the funding for these little Big Local areas, as you describe them? 

Brenda: They put in grant applications for projects. Sometimes the partnership commissions work out. For example, during the last consultation, debt and money problems were identified as being a big issue post-Covid. So, we gave Citizens Advice Bureau money to run specific debt advice services in our area, working with our families.

When we spend money, we want to be able to measure. We want to be able to look at the impact of the money that we spend. We’re very keen on the details of outputs.”

We set up a group called Horsefair and Proud. They live in the Horsefair and have been working on a lot of regeneration projects, in particular regeneration of the shops in the area that were really run down. We’ve funded to have the outside of the shops painted to spruce up the area, which has then attracted businesses to come back in.

We’ve put in lots to health and wellbeing projects. We’ve got a lot of community parks groups. We’ve funded walking trails, children’s playgrounds and gardening projects in schools.

We’ve done loads of stuff. When we spend money, we want to be able to measure. We want to be able to look at the impact of the money that we spend. We’re very keen on the details of outputs.

Q: Which initiatives have given you the most personal pride? 

Brenda: I would say the greatest success of the partnership is building people. One very good example, we have a person on the partnership who would describe herself as being ‘gobby’. She has had a varied background, but she is the strength of the partnership. She is now very articulate.

We have another person on the partnership who asked us if she could stand as a local councillor. She became the Mayor of Kidderminster eventually. To me, these are the successes. They’re the people’s successes.

The community groups, the people in those community groups that are working for their communities, who want to improve their communities, they’re the successes. I think what the partnership has done is it’s allowed people to grow.

My view is you have to be left with people in the community who have been doing some growing, who are able to develop the resilience to keep going. Our whole thing has been about growing people, growing groups and then growing volunteers.

We’ve funded the growth of a community café. We don’t run the café but we have paid for the training of the volunteers and we bought them all the furniture and the kitchen stuff. But they’re the ones that do it, we don’t.

Q: How easy or difficult has it been to get other people to think strategically? 

Brenda: I think that’s been another of the partnership’s successes, that a group of people who hadn’t had experience of thinking strategically, now quite naturally think strategically. The money is not the driving force, it’s the people.

Q: Looking back at the work you’ve done with Big Local over the last nine years, what are the most profound changes that the funding has brought about? 

Brenda: I think it’s the work with the community groups and getting those groups out in the community and making a difference. The work is by no means over.

I would say that empowering communities takes decades. It’s not something that’s done in nine years. You can get a bit of a framework going. You can seed things and get things moving, but you’re really relying on future generations to continue that work.

Interview by Dan Davies.

Find out how DY10 Big Local used their strategic skills to run a local energy awareness social media campaign, and get tips for running your own campaign. You can read more inspiring stories from people delivering Big Local on our Voices page.