Zoekresultaten

Community engagement in deprived neighbourhoods during the COVID-19 crisis

The current COVID-19 pandemic confines people to their homes, disrupting the fragile social fabric of deprived neighbourhoods and citizen’s participation options. In deprived neighbourhoods, community engagement is central in building community resilience, an important resource for health and a prerequisite for effective health promotion programmes. It provides access to vulnerable groups and helps understand experiences, assets, needs and problems of citizens. Most importantly, community activities, including social support, primary care or improving urban space, enhance health through empowerment, strengthened social networks, mutual respect and providing a sense of purpose and meaning. In the context of inequalities associated with COVID-19, these aspects are crucial for citizens of deprived neighbourhoods who often feel their needs and priorities are ignored. In this perspectives paper, illustrated by a varied overview of community actions in the UK and The Netherlands, we demonstrate how citizens, communities and organizations may build resilience and community power. Based on in-depth discussion among the authors we distilled six features of community actions: increase in mutual aid and neighbourhood ties, the central role of community-based organizations (CBOs), changing patterns of volunteering, use of digital media and health promotion opportunities. We argue that in order to enable and sustain resilient and confident, ‘disaster-proof’, communities, areas which merit investment include supporting active citizens, new (digital) ways of community engagement, transforming formal organizations, alignment with the (local) context and applying knowledge in the field of health promotion in new ways, focussing on learning and co-creation with citizen initiatives.

Handreiking werken met communities

Op 8 juni 2017 vond het symposium Burgers, boswachters en buitenlui aan de slag in de natuur plaats. Ongeveer 70 deelnemers woonden de middag op het karakteristieke Kasteel Hackfort in Vorden bij. Onder hen waren onder andere medewerkers van Natuurmonumenten, Staatsbosbeheer, Landschap Erfgoed Utrecht, IVN, Wageningen UR, verschillende waterschappen, Movisie, Rijkswater-staat, Vereniging van Bos- en Natuurterreineigenaren (VBNE), Sovon, Dunea, 12Landschappen, Free Nature, en adviesbureaus.

Creating age-friendly communities: Housing and technology [book]

The “Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology” publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities. (This book is a reprint of the Special Issue Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology that was published in Healthcare)

Public Private Learning Communities

Biodiversity conservation in climate change driven transient communities

Species responding differently to climate change form ‘transient communities’, communities with constantly changing species composition due to colonization and extinction events. Our goal is to disentangle the mechanisms of response to climate change for terrestrial species in these transient communities and explore the consequences for biodiversity conservation. We review spatial escape and local adaptation of species dealing with climate change from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. From these we derive species vulnerability and management options to mitigate effects of climate change. From the perspective of transient communities, conservation management should scale up static single species approaches and focus on community dynamics and species interdependency, while considering species vulnerability and their importance for the community. Spatially explicit and frequent monitoring is vital for assessing the change in communities and distribution of species. We review management options such as: increasing connectivity and landscape resilience, assisted colonization, and species protection priority in the context of transient communities.

The conceptualisation of vital communities related to ageing in place

Older people today are more likely to age in their own private living environment. However, many face declining health and/or other issues that affect their ability to live independently and necessitate additional support. Such support can be provided by formal networks, but a considerable part can also be offered by informal networks of older people themselves. Going beyond these networks, older people can additionally and perhaps even more substantially benefit from vital communities. Nevertheless, even though this term is increasingly common in the literature, its meaning remains indistinct. A more thorough understanding of this concept might provide valuable knowledge that health care professionals, researchers and community workers can use to offer meaningful and effective support. The purpose of this paper is to draw on existing empirical research on vital communities to build knowledge of the different descriptions and dimensions of the concept. Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review methodology was adopted. Our search, conducted on 23 March 2020 and updated on 06 January 2021, yielded 4433 articles, of which six articles were included in the scoping review. We deduced that the conceptualisation of a vital community is based on three dimensions: the aim of a vital community, the processes behind a vital community and the typical characteristics of a vital community. None of the selected studies have mapped all three dimensions. Nevertheless, we assume that understanding all three matters when vital communities aim to contribute to the quality of life of people ageing in place.