Armley needs change – and All Together Armley has a plan

All Together Armley is a group made up of local residents, the council, police and key local organisations in Armley.

Here, chair Gudrun Shemilt provides details of a public meeting which will introduce a plan to help improve an area recently in the news following a race hate attack on a Polish man. Gudrun argues that to bring long-term change in Armley we must tackle root causes …

Over the last year All Together Armley has focussed on organising visible events, such as the Armley Festival, since our constitution a year ago.

The importance of these community events are second to none. But in the background we never stopped working on a long-term solution to tackle the problems we were tasked with in September 2015.

1,000 survey responses

Driven by survey responses of close to 1,000 people and constant interaction with our community, we were able to form an action plan to start working in partnership with the major statutory and third party agencies, local business and residents.

The key concept of this plan is that to bring long-term change we must tackle root causes, ultimately aiming for change from what is often a reactive service working at crisis points to a pro-active upstream approach.

Solving these problems defy solution from any one agency, business or resident, therefore the issues must be addressed holistically, looking at every aspect and collectively with every partner playing their part.

This is Partnership Working – All Together for Armley

In early August we presented our plan to those partners we needed to work with.

They went away to reconcile their response and returned to a round table meeting chaired by MP Rachel Reeves, who has been supportive of the whole process, on Friday (16th September).

Committed pledges to work together for Armley were made by West Yorkshire Police, Forward Leeds, Simon on the Streets, Swallow Hill and Leeds City Council to name a few.

Traders’ Forum

The area will also now benefit from the ATA traders forum providing a platform for local business development and support, headed by Saj Shah, franchisee of our local McDonalds.

The first meeting will be held on 20 October 2016, and we would like to invite all businesses in Armley to attend this.

We will now start to work with partners to action the objectives in the plan to bring positive change and development to the area.

Public meeting

A public meeting will be held at 6pm at Armley One Stop Centre on 28th October to introduce this plan to the community.

The community will have an opportunity to raise questions and also vote for a task to be added to the plan.

The heart of this strategy is that it is Community Led.

The objectives are not prescribed by the agencies that serve the area, so it is vital the community play their part by feeding into this strategy to ensure it continues to deliver what they want.

We look forward to seeing you there.