Community Champions – Making a difference – Rochdale Council

• Lead Member Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council
• Categories Community

Rochdale’s Community Champions are volunteers who actively help others to learn a skill or overcome a problem.

The Community Champions offer help with reading, writing, ICT, benefits and debt, domestic violence and abuse, mental health issues, and a range of other issues.  The Champions use a strengths based/solution focused approach, supporting people to make changes in their behaviour which enables them to take control and move forward.

The Community Champions Team is supported by the Skills and Employment team within the Economic Affairs Unit who provide them with the necessary training and backing as well as links to other agencies including GP surgeries, Adult Care, Drug and Alcohol, Libraries and the local Food Banks.

An innovative new area of work for Community Champions, having been identified by them, is working with victims of domestic abuse, and appropriate training has been provided.  The Champions’ link with the Greater Manchester Police’s Operation Strive.  Here, they accompany a trained police officer to ‘standard risk first time call out domestic abuse incidents’ to help understand and deal with the issues identified as the reason for the abuse.

The Community Champions are also supporting delivery of the ‘Citizen’s Curriculum’, a Learning and Work Institute pilot which has been recognised both at national and European level.  After consulting with local residents with low skill levels and a record of poor engagement with formal learning, the Skills and Employment Team are currently delivering an innovative ICT programme at a base in Kirkholt.  The programme is targeted at the hardest to engage in learning, including socially isolated single males.  Community Champions are supporting local residents to learn whatever they want to learn – some Community Champions are helping people to use the internet or set up an email account, whilst others are helping people learn basic computer programming.

One of the residents, a socially isolated single male with mental health issues had one of the highest call out addresses for the police.  Agencies who knew this resident said that he never engaged with anything and they didn’t think he could change.  The Community Champions Team supported him to change his behaviour, by using the solution-focused approach, and as a result the number of calls to the police has reduced significantly.  Community Champions have now engaged with him and he is a regular attendee at the weekly ICT programme at Kirkholt; he was also supported to attend the Digital Festival hosted by Rochdale Council.

 

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Rochdale

Principle 7 – care for community

Innovative

Community

Champions

Digital