In Essence

Who are IE?

IE are dedicated to improving the lives of communities and neighbourhoods. We are a social enterprise who train and assist people to better understand social & environmental problems with their neighbourhoods, using a consistent and repeatable process, and to develop successful, well designed interventions to improve those communities.

Why IE?

IE began as 'Intensive Engagement' focused on nighbourhood crime issues, but we soon realised that our approach is suitable for many different issues in neighbourhoods, including health, governance, safety, environmental and prosperity. In short, IE helps deliver the Egan Wheel of Sustainable Communities.

IE is also Latin for 'id est', which translates as 'in essence', or 'for example'. So, we have adopted IE as our 'in essence' brand.

How does it work?

IE is built on 8 steps of practice. These have been distilled from over two decades of practice and experience in designing and implementing community based solutions.
First, there has to be a good reason for getting involved, collecting the best possible data that already exists about a location.

The next phase is to verify that the existing data is accurate, through field work. This will enable more information about people, places and processes to be identifed and the richest possible picture of the whole community can be established.

Then the highly connected and highly capable people in the community can come together to better understand the problems and assets, the weaknesses and opportunities in the neighbourhood. They then agree a common vision for the neighbourhood, and create a plan of action. This action plan will also contain details of how to evaluate success, for all the stakeholders, and what to do if the plan gets stuck.

What issues do you cover?

Governance

-Egan's wheel starts with the aim of a neighbourhood being well run. Governance is more than just local authorities and elections. A sustainble community promotes the inclusion of all members of a neighbourhood, and creates processes to hear all parts of the community. A well run community uses consensus building techniques to make decisions, rather than divisive votes

Healthy and Safe

A safe community is one that experiences low rates of neighbourhood crime, where citizens are actively involved in keeping everyone safe.

This allows citizens to be more active and healthier, participating in promoting healthy behaviours across all members of the community.

Participating in community events only goes so far, the events themselves should not exclude, and there should be a wide range of opportunities to particpate.