Action plan
The majority of our work can be divided into four themes: People, Places, Charities, and Business. However, in our final plan we have decided to merge Charities into People, reducing this to three themes.
Alongside this, other budget lines are: our remaining pandemic funding, operational costs which mostly relate to employment costs of our programme manager and the proposed hiring of a community development worker, and our legacy funding to ensure the Big Local continues to have an impact after the programme ends.
In this section, we will explore the work we’ve done so far in each section, and our ideas for the next few years based on the consultation responses.
people
Over the last three years, our People theme has provided grants allowing residents to put on a variety of activities for local people. These include street parties, a social club for older Asian women, tree planting and mushroom growing projects, events promoting inclusion for children with special educational needs, and a Chinese New Year celebration. Between 2019 and 2022, 17 grants were awarded totalling £12,526.
As well as supporting residents to bring their ideas to life, we have also put on our own events. These include the annual Christmas carol concert and jumble trail, both of which are popular with residents and have helped to raise our profile as an organisation.
During the consultation, people told us they wanted to see more events that would help to bring different parts of the community together. There was a strong focus on health and wellbeing, particularly with people feeling isolated and vulnerable after the Covid-19 pandemic. We have begun to respond to this by organising a health and wellbeing day, to be held in St James Park in autumn 2022.
Our activity under the Charities theme - which will be merged into People - largely involves giving grants to local charitable organisations. Between 2019 and 2022, we gave eight grants totalling £64,155.
These included:
• Supporting Project Zero to run holiday clubs for young people.
• Enabling Salaam Peace to run homework clubs, and sports sessions for girls.
• Funding food bank Christian Kitchen to buy a new vehicle for their nightly food distribution and supporting local community centre the mill.
We also held a successful volunteers fair in November 2021 and paid for fundraising, HR, and safeguarding training for local partners, which was well received.
Next steps
In the final years of the Big Local, we will look to support initiatives that will have a long-term impact.
We aim to:
• Support more large-scale events to bring the community together, and provide opportunities for streets, community groups, and individuals to organise activities that benefit a diverse range of residents.
• Offer pots of funding to both individuals and organisations to support key themes that have emerged from our consultation, particularly around supporting young people, and mental health and wellbeing.
• Look at opportunities to support local community theatre and arts, exploring the benefits Soho Theatre Walthamstow can bring to the St James Street area when it opens on Hoe Street in 2023.
• Look to establish sustainable activities that will bring different parts of the community together, such as an intergenerational “tea and chat” club.
• Continue with our jumble trail, and look at running regular “pop up” swap shops to help reduce waste and support with the cost of living.
As part of our legacy planning, we will continue to review how we can best support the provision of inclusive community spaces, and invest in our local people to help them feel empowered to take action.
places
Over the last few years, our Places theme has focused on bringing more greenery and street art to the area.
This has included:
• A neighbourhood greening programme, which identified five streets where there were fewer trees and plants, and supported residents to improve the greenery in their front gardens.
• Commissioning murals and artworks like Angry Dan’s limerick on St James Street, Maud Milton’s ceramic roundels outside the Overground station, and Hixxy’s mural on Hazelwood Road inspired by the nearby Walthamstow Wetlands.
• Ongoing support for the 1B Gallery on Coppermill Lane, a shop front that has been converted into a small exhibition space.
Next steps
In our consultation, residents told us that they’d like to see more street art, more greening, and more public gym equipment. Other suggestions included more public seating and community clean ups.
In the final years of the Big Local, we aim to:
• Continue with our greening work. This will include a largescale project on the corner of Buxton Rd/Mission Grove to be conducted jointly with the local council to improve the greenery and public realm in the area. Community engagement - with residents, the local school, and the wider community - will be at the heart of this project and the hope is to transform existing unloved spaces into green, biodiverse spaces that the whole community can feel proud of and help maintain.
• Support residents with their own small-scale greening projects.
• Help Friends of St James Park to set up a shipping container in St James Park that will be a community hub and help the Friends do their voluntary work in the park.
• Keep improving our streets, parks, and other public spaces. This could include public art, seating, or gym equipment.
business
Most of the work in the Business theme can be divided into two strands: social entrepreneurship and business support.
Social entrepreneurship
From June 2018 to December 2020, St James Street Big Local partnered with UnLtd, an organisation that supports social enterprises, to offer grants to social entrepreneurs.
Applicants were required to submit a detailed business plan and pitch to a panel comprising the UnLtd awards manager and Big Local partnership members.
Together we provided a total of £50,000, of which one third was our contribution. We were successful in awarding the full budget, with 12 grants ranging from £2,500 to £5,000. Awardees were also given mentoring support from UnLtd.
Successful projects included:
• Expanding a forest school. The funding enabled additional staff to be trained allowing the school to deliver to more young children.
• Support for people with debt problems. The funding provided was to enable a bid writer to be engaged. The awardee continues to develop social based projects in the Walthamstow area.
• A directory of local black-owned businesses. An online black business directory for Waltham Forest “Black Umbrella” has been created. The website as of August 2022 lists 51 businesses across 15 industry sectors.
• An after-school study group for young people. Study support and life skills sessions in conjunction with Salaam Peace.
Business support
We had planned to create a network for local businesses to share information about upcoming opportunities and to collaborate on ideas. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic prevented this. In the meantime, Waltham Forest Council has set up a local business network and the East End Trades Guild has increased its footprint in the area.
Next steps
Following our consultation, and based on input from CRATE, we are aiming to re-establish a social enterprise fund, inviting local social entrepreneurs in our area to bid for awards between £1,000 and £2,500, with a total budget of £16,000.
In terms of business support, we plan to signpost local businesses to Waltham Forest Council’s local business network and the East End Trades Guild. We will also offer bursaries to up to 25 local SMEs to cover the cost of one year’s membership of the East End Trades Guild, equating to a budget of £4,000.
A theme that emerged from our conversation with CRATE was the number of local independent businesses who make and sell their own products. We will work with CRATE to facilitate a mini makers market, helping to secure a venue through sponsorship and signposting. A budget of £750 has been set aside for this. The end goal is that the makers will secure a shared space where they can make their products on site.
Pandemic funding
At the start of the pandemic, Local Trust gave each Big Local an extra £50,000 to support residents. Thanks to the flexibility of the programme, we were able to respond quickly to the needs of people in the St James Street area. Support included providing over 300 tablets to local schools to support children with home learning, funding food banks and mutual aid groups, and providing hardship grants to residents.
Next steps
With our remaining funding, we will look at how we can support residents struggling with the cost of living by continuing to work with partners and stakeholders, including the council and local charities.
Operational costs
Our operational costs will largely cover the costs of employing our staff to help us put our ideas into action. All our partnership members are volunteers. We have jobs, caring responsibilities, and other commitments outside of the Big Local.
Like many Big Locals across England, we have realised that we need to employ staff to make our plans work and fulfil our commitments to residents. Alongside our programme manager, we will also recruit a community development worker to help deepen our links in the community, build sustainable partnerships, and support our work in the People theme.
We also have a small rented office space in CRATE, and have budgeted for some marketing and printing costs to ensure that residents know about our activities.
Legacy
The overall aims of the Big Local project are that after ten years:
• Communities will be better able to identify local needs and take action in response to them.
• People will have increased skills and confidence, so that they continue to identify and respond to needs in the future.
• The community will make a difference to the needs it prioritises.
• People will feel that their area is an even better place to live.
As part of the Big Local plans, £200,000 of the £1 million given to each area is intended to help them invest in a legacy project to support their local area. This could include supporting ideas or activities which strengthen civil society, bring the communitytogether, develop residents’ skills and confidence, invest in future generations, and sustain existing activities.
St James Street Big Local partnership members have produced a legacy strategy (see Annex II). Alongside the neighbouring William Morris Big Local, we have also advertised for acommunity consultant to present options for how we can work together to provide Walthamstow with a long-lasting legacy from our two Big Local programmes.
The main aims of the work are:
• To research and write a report for the two Big Locals that provides an appraisal of our legacy vision within the context of the community sector in Walthamstow. This report will consider local challenges and opportunities for the community sector, and look at the local authority’s strategy for third-sector support in the coming years. The report will be vital to giving us a clear understanding of our projects beyond 2026.
• To draw up a comprehensive options paper with different directions the Big Locals could take to deliver their legacy in Walthamstow. This will include setting out milestones as well as resource implications. It will also consider what work each Big Local needs to do separately and what we can do together.
• The report and options paper are expected to be completed by the end of 2022 and our firm legacy plans will be produced in Spring 2023.
see also
background
The Big Local programme is an experiment in resident-led decision making. It gives 150 communities in England at least £1 million each, and allows them the freedom to…
Our impact so far
St James Street is quite a different area in 2022 to how it was just a few years ago…
consultation
In April 2022, we launched a six-week consultation to find out what residents thought our priorities for the area should be…