Stronger communities

In September 2020 Protection Approaches launched a ground-breaking Community Builder Training Programme, a London-wide initiative supported by the Mayor of London. In just 5 months this programme has equipped more than 300 Londoners passionate about creating positive change in their communities with the tools, principles, and methodologies they need to tackle injustice, bridge divides and build respectful, resilient communities. 

The workshops are accompanied with bespoke materials containing best practice in community building, community organising and peacebuilding from around the world empowering people who are already deeply involved in their local areas and therefore best placed to deliver community building work with the understanding of how to do that work. After the workshops, participants are tasked with putting their training into action. They initiate new projects, build on existing networks, and integrate what they’ve learnt into their forums, clubs, WhatsApp groups, and other means of community organising or neighbourhood support.  

In December Protection Approaches, Chinese Welfare Trust and Newham Chinese Association launched Confronting COVID-related Hate: Standing with Britain’s Chinese, East & South East Asian Communities, an emergency project that is supporting a nationwide network of British Chinese, East, and Southeast Asian community organisations to respond to the rising levels of hate crimes. The outbreak of COVID-19 saw an increase of anti-Asian hate crimes of 300% in the UK, and recent hate attacks in the UK and US have further increased anxiety. 

Since January our team has delivered ‘responding to hate crime’ training to 190 staff members/volunteers from 24 East and Southeast Asian community groups across England, as well as distributing £70,000 in funding to support these organisation helping them to increase their capacity to respond to hate crime and support their communities at this time of heightened anxiety. 

This programme, written up in the Independent here, has been exceptionally well received by community members. Our evaluation shows that so far, activities undertaken by community groups following the training have reached more than 60,000 community members helping to raise awareness of hate crime, hate crime reporting, and how best to support victims.  

Over three years Protection Approaches has been running a pilot programme across three London boroughs working with marginalised socio-economic, ethnic, religious and cultural groups to explore their personal experiences or perceptions of prejudice or marginalisation. Working with leading artists and using photography, painting, film, interviews, drama, and other mediums, the participants have shared their experiences of living in London today. 

The stories and experiences have formed the basis of  physical  and digital exhibitions that the project participants presented to local decision makers, in order to start conversations on what can be done to address the root causes of marginalisation locally. 

These programmes aim to test what works to help fill the gaps that exist in local-decision making, often disconnecting local council, police, and civil society, and where those from marginalised communities are too commonly absent. We work to broker new and sustainable community relationships that will facilitate community-led change in some of London’s most disadvantaged boroughs.

All our community programmes are evidence based. 

We undertake, commission, and coordinate research and evaluations to ensure that the programmes we develop and test are supported by evidence of what works and in line with global best parctice from the fields of peace-building, atrocity prevention, countering extremism and violent extremism, and community cohesion building. We also commission national social attitude and public opinion surveys that inform our work and priorities.