BCT Regenesis

In working with neighbourhood communities to achieve transformational change, the BCT Regenesis Team has particular strengths in:

• Business incubation & enterprise generation
• Community engagement & capacity building
• Social enterprise & social accounting
• The ‘clean & green’ agenda
• The ‘strong & safe’ agenda
• Inclusive children ’s & young people’s services
• Community health & well-being
• Asset development
• Economic links between urban & rural communities
• Long-term neighbourhood based partnerships

For us then, the measure of success in the regeneration of a neighbourhood is the extent to which agreed programmes of action have a direct, positive and quantifiable impact upon agreed liveability indicators.

This requires clarity from the outset about the things which can and will be systematically measured to validate the transformational nature of the regeneration process. The BCT Regenesis team will typically identify just a handful of unambiguous measures which can be readily recorded or interpreted at neighbourhood level.

We appreciate that real improvement in Quality of Life depends on meaningful change in a limited number of crucial factors which impact upon residents’ routine, daily experience. It doesn’t necessarily depend upon meeting a set of standardised targets!

Using the ‘Sustainability Audit’ as a starting point, the BCT Regenesis Team works with individual communities to identify the key social, environmental and economic factors where even modest improvement could have a transformational impact on local quality of life. Each neighbourhood will have its own particular mix of these ‘liveability indicators’ and accordingly require its own particular plan of action to deliver transformation.

In our terms, ‘transformational impact’ also means ‘inclusive impact’. There is little point in promoting action or investment which results in sections of the resident community becoming further disengaged, marginalised or displaced.

Short-life, government-led neighbourhood regeneration programmes are too often characterised by their legacy of unsustainability.

By contrast, the work of the BCT Regenesis Team is focused 100% on long-term transformational impact. We believe that however good an idea may appear to be, if it can’t be sustained then it’s not worth doing!

Our work with any community will typically begin with a ‘Sustainability Audit’ as an initial, objective assessment of how well the community and its representative organisations operate.