The research in Suffolk is developing well and lots has happened over the last months.

With the help of our local partners – the Suffolk Association of Voluntary Organisations, and its member organisation, the Suffolk Volunteering Federation – I’ve been able to talk to a huge variety of people and organisations. Contacts range from local voluntary organisations to statutory organisations that work in the wider region of West Suffolk and beyond, as well as individuals who live and work in Suffolk. I’ve been visiting the local Community Partnership organisation, Young Suffolk and a Volunteer Centre. I’ve also the good fortune to attend the West Suffolk Local Strategic Partnership Annual Conference. This enabled me to experience ‘participation’ first hand, and to get a feel for how consultation about the community strategy is conducted and what the key concerns are of the delegates from across West Suffolk.

Basic things like popping into the local newsagents have also been hugely informative. Not only did I discover that that there are two rival local papers, but also that the local newsagents carry papers in Polish, Turkish and Italian, indicating some of the minority languages spoken in the area. The local papers carry a lot of relevant information relating to a wide variety of participatory activities – from donating to charity, the organisation of charity walks, to updates on recent developments in the local volunteer centre and the tensions between local councillors and residents over planning issues.

Since Leeds was confirmed as the inner-city area for the project I have been meeting with various key stakeholders to introduce the project and find out a bit more about the participation scene in the city. Some of the people interested in the project and who I have met include various members of the local authority; the Primary Care Trust; a social enterprise; the chair of the VCFS strategy group; the volunteer development manager at Leeds Volunteer Centre; a key member of the local strategic partnership and a variety of volunteers and local activists.

Whilst exploring the wider area of Leeds, I have learned of some interesting participation sites and events. This included a former primary school that had recently been occupied by local residents who were campaigning for the building to be saved for community use, as well as various exciting events being organised for next year’s Leeds Year of Volunteering. With the help of Voluntary Action Leeds and other partnering organisations, we are now close to deciding on the smaller, case-study area within the city.

Just over a month into the field work has seen me walking about with a camera and notebook and meeting people in different parts of Enfield – a north London borough and our selected ‘suburban’ area. Paula Jeffery, the Chief Executive of Enfield Voluntary Action (EVA) and one of our key partners, has given me some valuable insight into the area through sharing her local knowledge – its history, its geography and some of its defining characteristics. So far I’ve met with people from all three sectors – voluntary (e.g. the Volunteer Centre), statutory (e.g. Police and Local Authority) and private (e.g. Chamber of Commerce).

Many of Enfield’s voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisations (e.g. Enfield Disability Action and the Volunteer Centre) are based in the same building called ‘Community House’ – a friendly place in the south east of the borough with a volunteer-ran café open to the public. A large number of north London’s business infrastructure organisations (e.g. Enfield Business and Retailers Association) are housed in the north east of the borough in the same building, called ‘Enfield Business Centre’. These infrastructure ‘hubs’ seem to really facilitate collaboration and communication – something that one of my interviewees commented on.  

A helpful conversation with a head of service at the Local Authority, walking about making observations and visiting an exhibition at London’s Museum of Transport, are helping me narrow down my fieldwork area to an approximate 2 mile square patch based around three Underground stations. The combination of excellent transport links to the city centre and an abundance of 1930s semis should make this fertile ‘suburban’ ground for the research to take place in.