The Stocksbridge Case Study

Stocksbridge Training and Enterprise Partnership (STEP) The present project has been set up by the STEP Director, Chris Prescott - (email); STEP is an entirely local community initiative which began operating in the Stocksbridge District (popn. 13000) of Sheffield City (popn. 600,000) in 1997. It has the backing of the City Council but no funding from them; the past eighteen months have been spent trying to work out how to get funding to run the Partnership and to pay for the local activities which STEP intends to stimulate. It is a typical example of many community projects which rely on the idea and drive of one person to get going; it is typical of those projects which the present Government hopes will bring about an improved quality of life at the local level. STEP still operates mainly on a goodwill basis with part time staff and very limited resources, although it has recently attracted some EU funding for premises. The intention of this Partnership is to improve the local quality of life through stimulating a growth in the availability of jobs; to do this it intends to organise local training schemes and to link businessmen with potential employees.

The Problem - what to do to start a Local Agenda 21 As part of their input to the local community, STEP decided to explore the potential for jobs in the environmental sector through developing a Local Agenda 21 and was encouraged to do this by the City Council. Early in 1998 STEP appointed two recent graduates as Local Agenda 21 staff for 12 months. It was anticipated by the STEP Board that it would be a fairly straightforward operation to get environmental projects related to sustainability up and running, but it rapidly became apparent that there was no money to stimulate local actions and no clearly defined idea of what Local Agenda 21 really meant at the level of a local community. The Local Authority provided its check list of how to ensure sustainable actions through policy making, and central Government, the Environment Agency and the voluntary agencies, such as Friends of the Earth, provided a wealth of useful literature showing why people and communities needed to change their behaviour patterns so as to ensure a more sustainable future for urban areas. None of this helped to develop a clear picture about how Agenda 21 should be tackled in a place like Stocksbridge.

Click here to return to Stocksbridge Menu

 

 

Click image to return to MAP21 Ltd Index