As your Big Local Rep, every three months I share my thoughts on local area progress with you as residents and with the central team managing the national programme. Your comments and thoughts are always welcome.
Big Local is half way through. An excellent report charting challenges and achievements is well worth a scan. There are also loads of small film clips from residents about the impact you are making. A more catchy way of capturing the Big Local magic is to listen in to these lyrics written at Big Local Connects 2019. Locally and nationally, to quote Local Trust CEO, “We are telling out story more proudly and it seems to be having an effect.”
Priorities and achievements looking back: running things well, accountability and transparency, reviewing the partnership and building sustainability
Running things
The partnership and plan delivery are working well. The partnership meets monthly to review plan progress and finances. Minutes are posted on the website. In October, quarterly management reports were approved and these and the service level agreements are posted on the website along with good news stories of local action and change and newsletters. In November, the partnership review was submitted. In December, the partnership explored models of shared working and collaboration after Big Local ends.
Doing things
Another excellent Christmas event was held at St Martin’s, being run on a reduced budget that models a sustainable future for this much loved event. Along with established areas of work, Allenton Big Local has funded Derby Adult Learning to run half term and holiday activities at St Martin’s Community Hall. These have been very well received. The October programme ran over three days. 99 children took part, with some attending multiple days. The sessions covered music and poetry, creating a textile banner and Halloween crafts. “There were some excellent outcomes and some of these could form part of the ABL legacy. For example, the textile banner is to be displayed at St Martin’s Church and a moving poem, created by the children will be read out at the AGM.”
Key priorities looking ahead
The partnership is planning its AGM for February and as part of this its annual report will be produced and circulated. It will continue to explore ways in which Allenton Big Local could continue to work and benefit residents as an affiliation of partners, rather than as a new organisation.
Local Trust has announced additional funding for all 150 areas taking part in the Big Local programme, including Allenton. Big Local areas will each receive an extra £105,000 on top of the £1 million already committed to helping make their communities even better places to live. 
On 7 December members of the Allenton Big Local Partnership Group attended a Locally Trusted Organisations and Big Local Partnerships learning and networking event at The Edge in Sheffield.
Allenton Big Local was one of 20 Big Local areas chosen to participate in a piece of research conducted by Resources for Change on behalf of Local Trust. The aim of the research was to:
The Partnership Group met in January to review the first year of the Allenton Big Local plan. The session was aimed at checking progress against objectives, assessing the effectiveness of activities, and identifying action points for the second year of the project. The group also reviewed changes that had taken place locally during the last year, and revisited the project vision and themes to check that they still met the needs of the local community.
