Together We Can! is an intergenerational, community-building project within the Firs & Bromford an outer estate in Hodge Hill in the East of Birmingham. A key element of the project is ‘street connecting’ – which involves making connections with, and between, local people, and growing new groups and activities from those connections.

Street Connecting is facilitated by Paul Wright, the Street Connector Mentor. Paul’s role is to be an animator (someone who helps people get organised) with the connecting itself led by a group of local people.

You can read this Birmingham story of Asset Based Community Development in action on the project blog

Visit streetconnector.com

Street Connecting is a partnership between Open Door Community Foundation and Firs & Bromford Neighbours Together. The project started in the summer of 2016, but built on over a decade of intentional community building in Firs and Bromford.

Project Evaluation

You can also view reflection and evaluation of TogetherWeCan! that maps the first three years of the projects journey, exploring how things worked in practice, including some of the surprises encountered along the way.

TogetherWeCan! works with different age groups and has three parallel ‘strands’ of work:

• ‘street connecting’ - making connections with, and between, local people, and growing new forms of associational life from those connections;
• ‘doing stuff together’ - facilitating places and groups which local people feel they belong and can contribute to;
• ‘support and development’ - supporting local people to grow in the confidence, skills and connections needed to be able to participate in and contribute to the life of their neighbourhood, and wider world.

TogetherWeCan! Year 1 evaluation

TogetherWeCan! Year 2 evaluation

TogetherWeCan! Year 3 evaluation