Community health creation in Cliftonville West

A group of residents in Cliftonville West, one of the poorest areas of Kent and the UK, have shown how engaging communities in their own development can achieve significant improvements in residents’ lives and well-being in just a few years.

The creation of A Better Cliftonville (ABC) in 2013 has allowed the community to take ownership of problems impacting on their quality of life, and provided a framework for them to work with local agencies to combat these.

Cliftonville West was originally a popular holiday destination in the early 20th century, but in more recent decades, the area has become known for its social and economic deprivation, which intensified during the economic recession of the early 2000s.

This started to turn around in 2013 when the Kent County Council public health team heard of the C2 Connecting Communities programme, an initiative to mobilise residents to improve their surroundings and health, and provided funding to establish it in Cliftonville West.

Kay Byatt, a local resident at the time and community development worker, was responsible for getting the volunteer-based initiative underway. Byatt said having face-to-face meetings between residents and agencies was an important part of the process, as it got people talking to each other and to the service providers’.

Once the ABC group was set-up, a working group of seven residents and three local agencies started to tackle key waste management issues, leading to improvements in council recycling services and new communal bins for household waste.

Other success include an anti-dog fouling campaign, and obtaining a grant from the council to improve and maintain one of the parks, now being used more often and by a greater range of residents.

Improving the waste problem has resulted in a safer, healthier environment for residents, and a renewed sense of price and community spirit is evident, says Kay, which is impacting people’s emotional well-being.

ABC’s waste working group has been so effective in addressing its priorities and engaging the council in waste monitoring and improvements, that it’s planning to disband to allow members to focus on other projects.

Kay added: “Residents have realised the power they have to get involved and influence changes, and so they’re encouraged to do more things, and feel so much better in themselves. People are saying ‘we’ve had years of being done to, and now we’re doing our own thing and are doing it together with the service providers’. It’s a whole new way of operating.”