Centre of Excellence in Community Cohesion (2)

I rush straight from Braunstone Leisure Centre to St Philip's Centre (dropping off our exhibition at the Welcome Centre on the way) for the first meeting of our small group working on advancing ideas and proposals for presenting Leicester as a centre of excellence in community cohesion. There are five of us meeting today: Jasbir Mann (Head of Learning Services, Leicester City Council) who's responsible for driving this project forward; Dilwar Hussain (from the Policy Research Centre), Riaz Ravat (Training Manager at St Philip's Centre), Resham Singh Sandhu (President of the Sikh cultural and Welfare Society and former Chair of Leicester Council of Faiths) and me.

The one definite proposal we agree upon to put to the larger group is that we should be going for a virtual presence for this centre, not a geographical physical site. Jasbir will work that into a position paper that we can present to the next full meeting.

CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE IN COMMUNITY COHESION: 1

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.