Creative Councils shortlist announced

NESTA and the Local Government Group has announced the 17 councils on the shortlist for the Creative Councils programme, which aims to support councils to develop new approaches to meet the challenges facing communities and local services.

The shortlisted councils will work alongside NESTA and National Endowment for Science Technology, receiving practical and ‘modest’ financial support to develop their ideas over the next six months.

In early 2012 five councils from the list with ‘the most promising ideas’ will be selected to receive financial and non-financial support from NESTA to put their ideas into practice for approximately the next two years.

Philip Colligan, executive director for public services lab at NESTA, says, ‘There’s a lot of appetite in the councils for involving users in co-design, but not much on the paperwork of how they’re going to do that.

‘It highlights the skills gap: the councils that have applied understand that design techniques can help them create more effective services but they don’t know how to do it.’

Throughout the programme, lessons and tools developed with the chosen councils will be shared with other councils across England and Wales.

One of the chosen councils, Cornwall, has proposed the idea Re-kindling Communities, which aims to give local people and councils creative skills to enable them to collaborate on community-owned problem solving.

The shortlisted councils:

1.     Brighton and Hove

2.     Bristol

3.     Cambridgeshire

4.     Cornwall

5.     Derbyshire

6.     Essex

7.     London Borough of Havering

8.     London Borough of Islington

9.     Leicester

10. Monmouthshire

11. Reading

12. Rossendale

13. Rotherham

14. Stoke on Trent

15. Westminster

16. Wigan

17. York

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