A Springboard Plan for Spring 2022
Edited on
25 February 2022It’s not quite spring yet - but this seems a good time to be writing about Springboard Plans (and Investment Plans). As I write this, the sun is shining and there is a beautiful crystal-clear blue sky. With a cup of tea (and a biscuit) in hand, I’ve just read a draft of our Birmingham Springboard Plan.
Each of our 3 partner cities (like us here in Birmingham) have been working hard for a good few months now to produce a Springboard Plan (and also an Investment Plan) for each city. Birmingham’s plan is looking very inspiring and promises a real opportunity to rethink the way we do business as usual.
Taking the text directly from the Springboard Plan’s introduction:
"For Birmingham, the URBACT programme is also the opportunity, as the Lead Partner City to reflect upon the successes and challenges of the initial UIA USE-IT! project, learn from the other partner cities, and transfer the USE-IT! method to a new neighbourhood, namely East Birmingham. It is the purpose of this Springboard Plan to explain how this ‘transfer’ will take place, both during and after the delivery of the Transfer Mechanism (up to September 2022) and also detail our ambitions for this process.
This Springboard Plan has been developed through a series of support activities over a 2-month period (January 2022 to February 2022) led by the Ad-Hoc Expert for the USE-IT! Transfer Mechanism, Conrad Parke, supported by the Lead Expert, Matthew Baqueriza-Jackson and in partnership with Birmingham’s Urbact Local Group (ULG)."
In essence, we’re looking to pick-up from where we left off with the original USE-IT project in West Birmingham, by trying a similar approach, albeit on a much larger scale, in East Birmingham. This is exciting!
The plan really reflects the ambition and willingness of Birmingham to ‘think outside the box’ and try out new approaches. There’s everything in the plan from Community Research; Employment Approaches (including creating Social Enterprise Hubs); changes to Procurement Processes; Community Economic Development Planning and much more.
The meetings over the past couple of months have been frothing with activity and creative ideas – with fantastic contributions from everyone.
So, on a nice bright spring-like day in February, it seems that a good Springboard Plan is coming together nicely. We look forward to sharing the full plan with everyone when it’s ready.
Submitted by James Carless on