Decision details

Renewing the City’s Cohesion Strategy through a co-production model with the Cohesion Advisory Group

(i) To adopt the Charter as the Council’s future approach to community cohesion work;

(ii) to agree to the listed actions in the Charter as the first set of actions for the new Sheffield City Council Community Cohesion and Integration action plan; and

(iii) to note the approval of the Cohesion, Migration and Integration Strategic Group (CMISG), chaired by the Chief Executive, as the appropriate partnership group and accountable body for the new Charter and actions.

The Charter option was chosen as the most appropriate and most practical way to show the Council’s commitment to the Sheffield Cohesion Framework.

The intended outcomes are to have a relevant and up to date set of actions in a Charter format that the Council can start with immediately to ensure that our day to day and specialist services contribute to cohesion in the city, and we are more aware of the impact of our daily service delivery on community cohesion across the city.

This action based Pledge method also allows us to learn from our work and evaluate what works best when working with communities on community cohesion issues, and use best practice for any new challenges.

Keep the old strategy.

The strategy could still be used, but it was written in a different political and economic time and may not be as relevant to Sheffield in 2018 as it was to Sheffield in 2008.

Create a new cohesion strategy for the Council.

We could create our own strategy but this would not show support for the 2 year co-produced Framework which other senior partners in the city have signed up to and are using. Using the same framework as other partners makes it easier to work together on cohesion projects in the city and shows our commitment to the new city wide Framework.

Keep all actions just internally for the Council.

The actions listed in this document are the ones the Council will lead on, but many more actions will be in partnership with other services, groups and communities. Partnership working brings together a range of expertise across sectors and is the preferred approach to cohesion building projects.

Create a larger, longer Charter.

It could be more comprehensive and could include all our services but would risk being too lengthy and less user friendly which could result in the actions in the Charter not being used, and not being achievable. It also may become quickly outdated if too many actions are put together. Cohesion work needs to respond quickly to rapidly changing circumstances, and actions need to be up to date and relevant.