Safer communities mentoring programme

Our Safer Communities Mentoring Programme (SCMP) helps community safety practitioners work together to benefit from each other's experience and ultimately improve community safety.

Challenging times for local authorities and partnerships, not least in terms of reducing funding, mean local government needs to find low-cost but successful approaches to tackling community safety issues.

The SCMP is one such solution, establishing a peer mentoring network that provides low-cost, sector-led expertise and support to community safety partnerships (CSPs), as 'critical friends' or 'buddies', to work alongside more formal peer review processes.

How does it work?

Imagine these possible scenarios:

• you're a new community safety officer needing an experienced 'buddy' from a similar organisation to ensure and reassure that you are considering and working on the right issues
• you are an experienced community safety manager trying something fundamentally different with your partnership, for example, new governance arrangements or a new joined-up work area, needing a fresh, senior sounding board to test your ideas on and challenge you back, based on their community safety experience.

This is where the SCMP comes in. CSPs can express an interest with the LGA's Safer Communities team for a peer. We then:

• discuss your needs with you
• identify and allocate the most suitable peer through our flexible system.

This enables you to work together to improve local community safety working and outcomes, such as reduced crime levels, people feeling safer and more involved with local services.

The SCMP builds on our previously successful work with peers, offering a tailored approach to local issues and developments.

What are the benefits?

Partnerships requesting and receiving this peer suppor will:

• learn from experienced community safety practitioners
• gain ideas and knowledge from those who have worked on what they are trying to do
• put that enhanced learning into practice, leading to results.

The peers themselves also learn and gain a lot. This work can provide development opportunities to mentor and coach others. It can be a real confidence boost to know that your experience is of use to others and that you can enable others to enhance what they are doing. This work can also, however, be a chance to visit, work with and learn from other organisations. Continual improvers are always looking for new ideas to develop, so sharing with others is a good opportunity for you to learn more about what others are doing.

Additionally, as a free service to LGA member organisations by and for the sector, it makes the most of and develops further community safety talent and expertise. It transfers skills and good practice throughout the country.

What other support is available?

Our SCMP forms just one part of our sectorled community safety programme of support, improvement and advice, which includes:

• peer challenges to help partnerships deliver better community safety results
• desktop reviews of key documents such as strategic assessments and partnership strategies to drive improvement
• online, interactive services including our Community Safety Community of Practice (CoP) that provides a safe and lively environment to share latest ideas and developments, events and documents with like practitioners.

LGA member organisations can claim peers' travel and expenses through the LGA. The SCMP service is also available for non-members at a standard charge of £30 a day plus travel and expenses.

Further information

If you have a question about the Safer communities peer challenge or, more generally, about our support for community safety, please contact:

Chris Williams
Community Safety Partnerships Advisor
Telephone: 07725 757796
Email: christopher.williams@npia.pnn.police.uk