Community Cohesion Strategy and Action Plan

Community Cohesion Strategy and Action Plan Consultation 11 March � 3 June 2008

This is Wrexham’s first Community Cohesion Strategy. It provides a strategic framework for community cohesion for the next three years 2008-2011. It has been developed by Wrexham County Borough Council together with other public and voluntary sector partners in Wrexham including the Local Service Board.

The Strategy provides an opportunity to establish a clearer understanding of our communities, and to have more effective communication with them in order to take forward specific cohesion activities. It recognises that community cohesion is a long term project and learning gained through the implementation of this initial Strategy and action plan will be used to develop actions in the future.

Community Cohesion is about actively promoting good relationships between all ‘communities’ in terms of age, gender, faith, race and sexual orientation, language and disability. However, this first Community Cohesion Strategy will focus mainly on cohesion in relation to race and ethnicity issues.

Our intention is that this first Community Cohesion strategy will:

Make clear how in the first 3 years of the Strategy we will develop processes to communicate more effectively with our diverse communities. This will help us to shape and inform all future strategies;
Make clear how community cohesion information will be collected and shared;
Make clear some direct action that will support cohesion at a community level; and
Show how we will monitor our progress to make sure that we do what we say we’re going to do.

We know that developing a picture of local cohesion will take a long time and will involve all our communities. Using your feedback on this draft Strategy we will continue to develop our understanding of what is important locally and the measures we must take to support cohesion in Wrexham.

We will be sending the draft Strategy and Action Plan to a wide range of people for them to comment on starting on 11 March and ending on 3 June 2008. This will allow organisations and groups across the County Borough 12 weeks to let us know what they think. A questionnaire has been produced for you to complete – this will make sure that we ask the right questions. If you want to tell us anything that is not covered by the questionnaire we will be pleased to receive it and there is space for this in the questionnaire.

We will make the changes needed before the final Strategy and Action Plan are published in September 2008.

Community Cohesion Strategy - Online Consultation Form

Deadline for responses: 3 June 2008