How Your City Works - Hull & Sheffield

A report highlighting the experiences of community empowerment learning programmes with a focus on 'How Your City Works' programmes can be downloaded here.

Active Citizens - Stronger Communities (pdf 748 kb)


In 2001 the Community Network staff team together with the University of Hull developed a ten week informal course, 'How Your City Works', to enable residents of Hull to come together to learn more about local decision making structures in the city and how to influence them.

The course has been a particular success and has been identified as an exemplar of good practice.  The course has been adapted by other third sector organisations (eg Offer, Sheffield Community Empowerment Network) as well as being used as an induction course for many local authority employees.

Course outlines for both Hull and Sheffield can be downloaded below:

How Your City Works (Hull)
How Your City Works (Sheffield)

Sheffield also offers a course in 'How Your Neighbourhood Works'.


pREParation training - Leeds

Leeds Voice, the Community Empowerment Network in Leeds, has a membership of over 2,000 groups and organisations.

Members can become involved in the Leeds Voice Forums (Health, Learning, Children and Young People, Environment) and Neighbourhood Forums.  From these groups, representatives (reps) are elected onto relevant city strategic partnerships, which are linked to the Leeds Initiative (the city's Local Strategic Partnership).

To support reps in their roles, Leeds Voice put together a training programme (pREParation) to enable members to:

  • have a better understanding of the decision making structures in Leeds
  • get to know what it means to be a rep
  • be able to influence the meetings attended in their role as a rep
Full details of the training programme and its impact are in pREParation training


How your Region Works

These sessions are hosted by the Regional Forum and they give an introduction to the structure of the Yorkshire and Humber region.Find out about
* The voluntary and community sector in the region
* How the region works
* Where the Regional Forum fits into the region
* The work of the Regional Forum and how you can link to it
* Regional Forum future plans

Dates for next Information Sessions:
* Thursday 27th March 2008: 4.00-6.00pm
* Thursday 24th April 2008: 4.00-6.00pm
* Thursday 26th June 2008: 4.00-6.00pm

See Events page for more details