Sheila Locke, Chief Executive at
Leicester City Council, has called a meeting this afternoon on the topic of
community cohesion. The meeting is in the CEO's Conference Room, seventh floor
of B Block in the City Council's New Walk Centre. This is the latest step in an
ongoing discussion, today moving on to consider the question, "What would
a Centre of Excellence for Community Cohesion Look Like?" Representatives
of the City Council, Federation of Muslim Organisations, Leicestershire
Constabulary, Policy Research Centre, Sikh Cultural and Welfare Society, St
Philip's Centre are also attending.
All of us here today have experience of
people coming from different parts of the country - from different parts of the
world - to find out how we do we do in Leicester. Some of them want to learn
how to make it work where they live; some of them think they can pull aside the
veil and be the one to expose some kind of chicanery at work underneath. I've
seen plenty of attempts at both sides in my time in this post. Leicester has a
positive reputation as a model, as a beacon for managing diversity. Can the
Leicester experience be bottled and marketed? Is the "centre of excellence
for community cohesion" the city itself, rather than some building to be
occupied or institution yet to be created? It's a short meeting, lasting
just an hour, by the end of which we've appointed a working group to address
some specific points:
- to scope something that looks like a model
- to include some research capacity
- to take stock of major themes
- to log work already being done
- to list conversations ongoing across the city
- to identify new conversations required in the city
- to decide what could be sustained locally (existing and new work)
- to pick out stuff that we think we should just have a go at
- to see what we can market nationally and/or internationally
- to propose where we could introduce some innovation
This working group (of Dilwar Hussain,
Jasbir Mann, Riaz Ravat, Resham Singh Sandhu and me) will meet in a week's
time at St Philip's Centre. The bigger group will meet again in a month or so,
which would allow this topic to be introduced into the autumn political cycle.
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