This is also a place where we proudly celebrate the rich diversity of our communities.
I’m delighted to share that this week we received the City of Sanctuary status, highlighting our proud history of being a welcoming borough.
This is presented to councils that go above and beyond to ensure refugees and asylum seekers are welcomed to our borough and supported.
We earned this award by working closely with voluntary and community sector partners across the borough to ensure Kingston is a borough that is welcoming and inclusive for everyone.
At the end of this month we will take our second Inclusive Kingston Strategy to committee for approval.
Residents, community groups, partners and organisations have shared their insights, challenges and hopes for the future through two rounds of extensive engagement.
Your voices have helped shape the actions and priorities in the strategy.
The aspirations of the new strategy build on the progress we have made over the last four years.
During that time we have worked hard to build stronger partnerships with our communities.
We have launched a new voluntary and community sector delivery partnership, an Inclusive Kingston Borough Alliance to provide insight in our work to tackle inequality, and a refreshed Kingston Faith and Belief Forum which supports our communities regardless of whether they share a faith or not.
Working with people who have lived experience, we have co-developed programmes of work that will better meet their needs, like our approaches to ending violence against women and girls and supporting all people with autism and ADHD.
This ensures we listen and learn from ‘experts by experience’ to shape services that address the things most important to them.
Residents and communities have had many more opportunities to engage with the council and share their views and insights, both digitally and in person, through a wide range of workshops, focus groups, resident panels and community conversations like the Urban Room approach to shape a plan for Kingston town centre, the climate conversation and Citizen’ Assembly to inform our actions to address climate change and being the first borough to hold a resident ballot to decide on whether to regenerate the Cambridge Road Estate.
Through forums like the new Kingston Disability Network and Kingston Faith and Belief Forum the voices of more communities are being heard.
Recently the Kingston Disability Network shared insight with our highways team about challenges people with disabilities face navigating our high streets, to help create less cluttered pavements.
Kingston Faith and Belief Forum have been working together on shared challenges for the community, fostering mutual understanding through events such as the Holocaust commemorations, their recent message of togetherness and unity, and the upcoming inter-faith walk on 20 November – you can sign up to join on Eventbrite.
Earlier this year a review of our council by the Local Government Association and senior council peers found that our commitments to ensuring equality and fairness are at the heart of everything we do is well integrated into our future plans and we regularly engage with underrepresented groups.
Through digital transformation we are working hard to make our services and processes fairer and more inclusive.
Our new council website was designed using research with residents to shape it, to ensure it is as accessible and user friendly and our Adult Social Care digital team has designed and tested several new digital processes with residents and professionals.
The valuable insights of people with lived experience and a range of disabilities, have a significant impact on services such as the new care cost estimators, or how people report safeguarding.
We will continue to put residents at the heart of all we do as we work to create a fairer and more inclusive borough, listening and learning alongside our communities to shape our services and approaches.
