Birmingham Community Safety Partnership: sharing good practice – final report

Many projects have been implemented across Birmingham, and elsewhere, focusing on crime reduction, community safety and neighbourhood renewal. The managers and staff working on these projects build up a great deal of knowledge about project management, solving problems, building relationships with partner agencies, and through this, develop an understanding about what has worked well and why, and what they would do differently next time. This constitutes good practice, which can be defined as ‘using practical lessons from projects and approaches to problems that have been developed and implemented successfully, and shown through evaluation to have been effective in achieving the desired outcomes.’ These good practice lessons need to be captured through robust evaluation, setting the context within which a project was conducted, how the available resources were used and the outcomes achieved. Evidence is needed to demonstrate why the methods used are good practice and how they can be adopted into future practice. It is also important that these good practice lessons can be presented in such a way to ensure that others can access this information and use it to inform their own work.