We help organisations that want to make a greater social impact, respond to change and meet the needs of their communities.

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Since the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, efforts to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour have increasingly been co-ordinated by local community safety/crime reduction partnerships, and local area agreements are now providing an even greater focus on this area of community development and regeneration.

We help agencies and local partnerships to develop practical, innovative and citizen-focused strategies to address the challenges they face. Our stakeholder engagement team, in particular, is skilled at helping agencies to listen and learn from their communities, and plan ways of enabling local communities – both as individuals and as groups – to take action to reduce crime and the fear of crime.

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Working examples

• Preventing Extremism Ewan King, OPM Director, spoke on 4 December at the Second Annual Conference on Tackling Extremism Together at the Barbican Centre. OPM is conducting one of the largest evaluations of its kind of the 'Pathfinder' work, happening across England, on tackling violent extremism. We are using both qualitative and quantitative methods and action research with Muslims in West London. See Ewan's slides from the event. View the conference brochure which sets out the agenda, speakers, etc. We'll report more fully on the work when it is completed.
• 'Hard to reach' groups: how do you consult them? Following the production of a crime and disorder audit by a London borough community safety partnership, OPM carried out a consultation with 'hard-to-reach' groups. Quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative consultations were used to ensure their views were woven into the borough's three-year plan to tackle crime and disorder.
• Citizen juries and area-based social inclusion partnerships   In Scotland we ran a series of 'people’s and stakeholders’ juries', piloting the use of such juries in area-based social inclusion partnerships. The topic was 'How can we improve the quality of life for individuals and families in communities affected by drugs?'
• Citizen-focused policing   Working with a number of local police authorities and constabularies, we coordinated the development of a good practice guide on citizen-focused policing.
• Citizens Panel   OPM is working with a large urban police authority to use their citizens’ panel in a way that has a dynamic effect on their policy development and governance of their police force.
• BME Communities Cracking Crime: Sponsored by a number of major London agencies, we co-designed and facilitated a two-day 'futures and open space' event which aimed to boost the involvement of black and minority ethnic communities in local crime and disorder partnerships and community projects, and to reduce the number of black and minority victims of crime.
• Community safety audits   OPM designed and ran a large 'open-space' event for 150 community safety practitioners (including police officers, community safety officers and voluntary sector workers) to identify and record good practice in conducting community safety audits. Fifty workshops were held, over two days, and an 80 page report produced by the following day.
• Community safety initiatives  In a unitary authority we advised on drawing up targets and action plans for their community safety strategy - including running discussion sessions with members and the community safety partnership, and one-to-one sessions with the community safety manager – providing best practice examples of successful community safety initiatives that have provided measurable outcomes.
• Community safety strategy: Using a 'whole system' process, we helped a local community safety partnership bring together all key players to create an integrated and creative strategy to tackle the crime- and drug-related issues within the city. The strategy that this work helped to create can be found on the Newcastle City Council website in the form of a downloadable PDF. For further information about our whole system methods, download a short booklet on whole system events.
• Courts: public consultation on courts arrangements   We designed and facilitated a process for discovering the public’s views about the future and what changes should be made to the design of services and buildings.
• Local area agreements:   We undertook an evaluation (published October 2006) for the DCLG which explored the negotiation of Round 2 LAAs and the early implementation of Round 1 LAAs. This built upon our process evaluation (published June 2005) of the negotiation of the 21 pilot LAAs for the DCLG, which informed the national rollout of LAAs. See also OPM's work on Local Area Agreements.

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