Conflict Awareness Training in Communities
This is a Cohesion Counts overview of the project. Click here for the project leader’s report.
Background
Project Aims
Project Objectives
What the Project Delivered
Background
In the early stages of Cohesion Counts, the steering group was approached by Good Relations Oldham (GRO) with an idea for an Alt based project to tackle some of the discord between the two local community centres on the estate: Alt TRA and ARC. GRO hoped to use mediation techniques to improve residents’ experience of living in Alt by getting the two community centres working better together to offer services to the local community, complimenting each other rather than conflicting with each other.
This was a very difficult project to get off the ground, as the two community centres hadn’t identified themselves as having any community cohesion issues. GRO had to tread very carefully in their discussions with the committees of the two centres in order to get their ‘buy in’. Once discussions started with Alt TRA and ARC, it became apparent that the issues that had existed between the two had already been resolved. Further investigation by GRO also identified conflict between the community and another Alt based organisation. As the organisation in question had no awareness of its role in this conflict, it was clear that resolution of the underlying issues could not take place within the timeframe of this project.
This all highlighted a discrepancy between the perceived areas of concern and actual issues, leaving GRO with the task of reviewing the information gathered from their meetings with the two community centres to decide whether there were any areas of work at either of the community centres, which could be progressed. It was clear that there was a need for ARC to deal with conflicts between volunteers, staff, attendees and the Alt community at large. The steering group agreed that in providing ARC staff and volunteers with conflict awareness training, that there may be some positive impacts in terms of the service ARC could then offer the community, and in turn increase feelings of satisfaction among ARC volunteers and Alt residents alike.
There was another area of work identified around building links between ARC (situated in the mainly White British social housing estate of Alt) and Fatima Women’s Association (situated in the neighbouring, mainly Pakistani heritage area of Glodwick). This became a separate project, with its own aims and objectives. (link to information on this project)
Project Aims
The following five aims make up the overarching focus of all the projects that have taken place as part of Cohesion Counts. The intervention projects have been evaluated within the framework of these aims. However, not every aim holds equal weighting for each project. The shape of the project changed considerably from being one of mediation between two community centres on the same estate, to one of providing conflict awareness training at one community centre. However, GRO felt confident that the original aims set out at the briefing stage remained appropriate:
- To improve residents’ satisfaction with the neighbourhood in which they live.
- To improve residents’ sense of belonging to their street, neighbourhood and borough.
- To improve residents’ perceptions of living in communities mixed by age, tenure, property types, areas of the neighbourhood and social and ethnic backgrounds.
- To improve relationships within neighbourhoods between residents mixed by age, tenure, property types, areas of the neighbourhood and social and ethnic backgrounds.
- To encourage residents to build relationships with people from different backgrounds from themselves through meeting and talking in a variety of places.
The conflict awareness training project focussed on aims 1, 4 and 5
Project Objectives
- To raise awareness of different conflict situations among trainees relating to both their work and personal lives.
- To develop skills among trainees that will help them handle conflict well.
- To train on how to develop processes that will help trainees to handle conflict well.
- To train on how to develop policies that will help trainees to handle conflict well.
What the Project Delivered
GRO delivered their conflict awareness course in modules and carried out training with ARC volunteers for one morning every week over four weeks in total. The course started out by identifying conflict situations, whether in the participants’ personal or work life and then used those examples to work on techniques to handle conflict situations better.
York Consulting independently evaluated the project (link to full evaluation report?) using pre and post project questionnaires to assess the distance travelled among participants and by face to face interviews at the end of the project to evaluate the level to which the project had reached its original aims.
