Derbyshire Neighbourhood Watch
Derbyshire Neighbourhood Watch
This year’s conference in at the Mercure Hotel in Manchester on Monday 23rd September was a great success with well over 100 attendees from all over England and Wales with a high number from the North West who usually are not able to attend the conference when it is in London. There were stands from Manchester Police, ERA, Simplisafe, Visav, Normanton Screen Print and several very interesting talks about the ‘Double Dividend’ of feeling safe; the police approach of ‘Clear, Hold, Build’; and Solution Focused Policing. The workshop from several members of the Youth Council about the work of the group and Neighbourhood Watch attracting younger people and developing different ways of engaging with them received very positive feedback. The workshop on two examples of local groups engaging in some really innovative and impactful work on reinvigorating an area and on a local school’s project passing cards made by local children to lonely people in the community was inspirational.
Without doubt one of the highlights for everyone was the Volunteer Recognition Awards in the afternoon. The winners of the awards for Innovation & Reach, Crime Prevention, Community Health & Wellbeing, and Young Volunteer were won by Sam Pritchard (Lancashire), Meir Factor (Greater Manchester), Lyn Doll (Humberside), and Louis Johnson (West Mids) respectively. There was also a Special Recognition Award for Brian Aldred from Crawley in Sussex. This award recognised the huge amount of time Brian has put into Neighbourhood Watch locally and across the Police Force Area over many years. While he was unable to attend the conference Robin Sutton received a Central Support Team Award recognising all his support to the CST. All the winners were superb and their work inspiring as were all the nominees. I would like to thank all the volunteers and members who nominated people for the awards as it again highlighted all the fantastic work happening locally across the organisation.
There was lots of very positive feedback about the content and the decision to hold the event in the North West. We received many compliments about the incredible main hall with all the sponsors in the same room not elsewhere. We are very grateful for the sponsorship from Visav who made the conference possible – they were able to tell us all about the potential new developments of the Alert system.
The Impact Report 2024 has been produced and highlights so much of the work of Neighbourhood Watch. The report can be downloaded at: NW 202324 Impact Report Digital-compressed_1.pdf (ourwatch.org.uk)
If you would like a hard copy or two of the report to use with the Police or PCC, please contact Cheryl at: cheryl.spruce@ourwatch.org.uk
You will all be aware that this year’s survey is out on Alert currently. As before, we are using Survey Monkey as we are keen to get feedback from non-members and non-users of Alert. We will be using the Alert survey tools for other questionnaires and will be reviewing feedback from partner charities/organisations on using Alert for all our future major pieces of research. If you can pass the link to your partners, stakeholders and across your non-Alert network that will enable the data to be as useful as possible.
The BT project is progressing well with local events happening across all the regions. The support and interest from volunteers has been brilliant but given the very local nature of the events any more interest and support from Association Leads to recruit more volunteers would be great. The area’s most in need of additional volunteers are Wales and some areas of the East of England. Feedback from the events being delivered by our volunteers has been extremely positive with many people feeling much more confident about the switch over, what they need to do and not succumbing to potential scams. All the Regional Coordinators are in place and will continue to liaise with you about the project.
We began the process of developing our next strategy with a Trustee Board and staff session reviewing the current strategy, our stakeholders and planning how we are going to involve Association Leads, volunteers and supporters in the work. We will be running a set of surveys and workshops with different groups to achieve this over the next six months. Following this a Strategy Group will be set up to analyse feedback and ideas and drafting ideas and direction. This will be fed back to Leads and stakeholders before amending and editing the strategy then gaining approval at the Annual General Meeting in 2026.
Newly appointed are: Emese Offenbacher, as Finance Officer and Alys Davies as Project Coordinator along with Steph Good the Project Manager in Devon and Cornwall. They are all settling in well and helping to increase the resource available to volunteers across the network.
Cheryl and I continue to attend local events and as always please share this letter with your Coordinators and keep us informed of local events and activity.
Warmest wishes,
John Hayward-Cripps
CEO Neighbourhood Watch Network
