Community Power Podcast Series 2 Episode 11: Transforming community wellbeing in Brereton

Episode 11: Transforming community wellbeing in Brereton

Chris Allen

Hello and welcome to this week’s Community Power Podcast, the series being brought to you in partnership with Local Trust. My name’s Chris Allen, and in this series, we’re showcasing some incredible projects, focusing in particular on what happens when you give local people the power, the money and the assets to make a difference in their neighbourhoods. With me, as ever, is series producer Beth Lazenby. Who are we going to be hearing from this week, Beth? 

Beth Lazenby

So this week, Chris, we’re up in Staffordshire, and we are chatting to Sue Merriman, who was previously a very dedicated volunteer, but is now a full time employee at Brereton Million Big Local. And she’s going to be chatting to us about a couple of really impressive wellbeing and youth projects that they’ve been running recently. 

Chris Allen

And when I caught up with Sue, I first of all asked her, what’s at the very heart of your community? 

Sue Merriman

The heart of our community is our play park. It’s the biggest area of the village. So we have, we had a play park with a paddling pool, which we know is massive for some areas, but the play equipment itself was like a 1950s play area. We had a couple of swings, a seesaw and a climbing frame that you could actually walk on the floor and just pull your hands up, and you could reach it even at sort of six years old. And we did have a very good big slide, which was the best thing about the park. So good that when we completely renovated the park, we left the slide in because we knew people would be upset, and now it looks really fab as it’s not the biggest thing in the park. 

Chris Allen

Those changes in the area has that begin to get people to say, ​“hey, this Big Local is something. It’s not just the same old, same old”. 

Sue Merriman

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a running track, which was completely covered in grass and weeds. We got our local youths to dig that all up for us. Then we hired the people to just come and skim it and lay the running track. So they could see, you know, we were serious. We’ve created a woodland walk around the back end of the park, and we’ve put in an outdoor gym so they could see it growing. And now they think we own the park. 

Chris Allen

Obviously, how are relationships with with the local council? 

Sue Merriman

We have our parish council, then we have a district council, and then we have a county council. 

Chris Allen

So it’s complicated. 

Sue Merriman

It’s very complicated. And when I started, I didn’t understand the different councils. I completely understand it now. And trying to educate people on how it works. It’s just as difficult as it was, trying to explain it to myself. When we started, it wasn’t a good relationship. They thought they could just have the money and do what they wanted. There was a few arguments along the way. And we just had to keep going out and out, and eventually, without the elected councillors who wanted to support. So they started sort of stamping their feet and supporting us, and eventually things started to happen. 

Chris Allen

Brereton Can. it’s a fantastic name. What can you do? 

Sue Merriman

So when we’d finished creating the play park, we wanted to put an event on to celebrate the achievement of that. And because the last thing we did was the open air gym, we were looking at some kind of fitness event. So we started researching all around the country of what had been going on, and we stumbled across Newcastle Can. And they had brought the community together in Newcastle to lose 100,000 pounds as a community, as the whole area, to lose this weight in one year. It took them just over a year, but they managed it. The Councils, the businesses, they all got together, and the residents worked on this campaign. And so we kind of moved away from actually an event, and started looking into this health and well being project. And it absorbed quite a lot of our time, because we knew we were onto something, and our idea was to do it slightly different. 

We were looking at how we could get the community groups and charities and businesses in our area to help with well being. So we created our own Brereton Can. The ​“Can” campaign had gone quite national then. So it started to become popping up in Devon, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall. So we kind of watched what they’d all done, and one of the things that they hadn’t really managed to achieve was working with the doctors. So we’d managed to work work with our local leisure centre and our doctor, and they were fully on board. So we managed to put an event together with all our local services. And even our doctors came along to say, ​“you might have an illness but you can work out doing this”. So she came to the event, and they told her what their conditions were, and said, ​“Okay, try this” using the groups that were there. 

And then we went and knocked on the District Council’s door and said, ​“we’ve, we’ve worked this campaign out, but we think it can be bigger, and we’d like it to become a district campaign, let’s make it Cannock Chase?” And they laughed at us and sent us away. But literally, just as we went to walk through the door, they said, ​“Hold on. We think you’re onto something”. But then they said ​“it would take us about two years to do the work you’ve done, but how about use what you’ve done as a pilot? Work with you and look at building Cannock Chase Can?” And two years later, we have Cannock Chase Can. It’s in the form, it’s in the form of an app. And we’ve created eight week eight parts of your well being. And basically still using community groups and charities and businesses you work on an area. So basically you could be working out and eating all the right things, but if you’re not sleeping at night, you’re still not working on your well being. And it’s to teach people like that. So yes, it’s been very successful, but I would now like to take it to the county council. 

Chris Allen

Well, you can work your way up through all these different councils. And what’s the kind of feedback you’ve been having? Say, from doctors practices, from surgeries, because you must be saving them some money as well with this kind of social prescribing approach whereby there’s alternatives to drugs, you know, go out and do something, get involved with something. 

Sue Merriman

We are just about to resit down with, with our local doctors again, to look at what they’re finding. How our Big Local plan works now is we try and put our projects under the wellness theme. So whether it be move well, eat well, sleep well. And that’s how we have started with the community shop, the therapy groups that we’re now running. 

Chris Allen

So you’ve brought everything together around now almost wellness. It run. It’s the golden thread that runs through all that you do, and I suppose in our lives, you know, wellness is at the heart of everything we are, isn’t it? 

Sue Merriman

Yeah, if you speak to any nurse, doctor, pharmacist, they will tell you, a lot of our illnesses are through not helping ourselves. And whether you are lonely and isolated. That is one of the biggest health problems, is cutting yourself off from the world. 

Chris Allen

Now, I know young people have been very much at your your heart, you know, you you work with them, but you also volunteer with them as as well. That’s that’s been a that’s very, very close to your heart. And what’s the kind of changes you’ve seen over your time there? Because, you know, you’ve been there since the beginning of the programme, 10 years, as you said earlier. Some of these children, young people, have grown up during that period. 

Sue Merriman

Oh, massively. I’ve got a group now at university who FaceTime me regularly when they’ve got issues. But no. So going from the start, we lost our County Youth Services. We’d just started a pilot youth group in the hall in our park. It was growing every week, so when we knew we were losing it, I went straight to the leaders of the youth service to see what we could do. So they taught me what was needed to run a youth group. And sadly, within the year, we ended up losing the youth services. I was determined not to let it go. So Brereton Million agreed to give us a £2000 grant, put everything that was needed in place, and we got the volunteers. Unfortunately, every time I tried to step away, we either lost the kids or we lost the volunteers. So in I made the decision to run it myself, voluntary, and it was successful. 

We probably had about 35 members every week. And these kids just brought themselves in off the street. It was a different type of youth group that I was ever used to, because my background was in girl guiding and sport. I’m a, I’m a youth worker for girl guiding, but I’m also a qualified coach for football. So kids that tend to bring themselves in, themselves off the street, different ball game. Because you never see their parents, so there’s nobody to sort of go, ​“yeah, they’re a bit wild tonight. Any reason?” You haven’t got that back that fall. So we did it, and we had a good plan, and I managed to get some good volunteers. So between us, it ran lovely. 

And in 2018 Brereton hit the worst spout of anti social behaviour that I’ve ever known. And I literally lived in the park day and night. We had to close the youth group because I couldn’t be in two places at once. And I ended up taking on some online youth detached lessons to teach myself what to do. And I ended up working in the parks. About half past two in the morning, the kids had got hold of zombie spice. And that seemed to be the craze at the time. They were smashing up everything, the defibs, the buildings, all sorts. We managed to set off what was called a council trigger. And that brought police, Council, social services, youth defending teams all together. And then schools, businesses in the area. And we managed to get about 85 residents to come to these meetings to work on a plan of how we could sort sort it out. 

I learned things from the police. I learned that I could take photos of the kids, as long as I was using it for the right thing and sending it in. Whenever they were misbehaving like that, I’d literally go and start taking photos, and I’d obviously get the backlash, and then I’d say, ​“right, you’ve got two choices. You stop this behaviour right now, and I delete the photos, or I go and take these photos to the police, and we deal with it this way”. And things slowly start, I started to get a bit of an ​“All right, then let’s do your way”. Once I got this relationship with some of them, the ones that had made the relationship started giving me names and started saying ​“Just to let you know, this has just happened, and this is who it is”. So then the police could sort of then go to the houses and start having words with them. We had five young people who had really caused some damage, and I managed to get the police to put them on like community service with me.So they had, they had to work with me every week. And yes, I got them to do some real dirty cleanup jobs, but at the same time, I got to work with them and find out what was going. And then try and get them into different things, you know, things after schools, different stuff like that. Fast forward to now. They’ve all got jobs. They still connect to me to this day. They’re lovely young people now. 

Chris Allen

Well, we talk about legacy and Big Local don’t we? And it’s obvious when you look in Brereton you’ve got, you’ve got the you’ve got the hub, you’ve got the play areas, got the open space, you’ve got the wellness, but it sounds like in these young people, you’ve got your own personal legacy that must be important for you. 

Sue Merriman

Yeah. Absolutely. We do a lot in the park. We look after the sheds and the trees and whatnot. So the once they got to know me, like, ​“Can I help you? Can I help you?” So when we reopen the youth group, I got got the young people together, and said, ​“right, we need to re advertise, let people know we’re out there. How would you advertise it? What do you think we should say about the youth group?” And they were like, you need, ​“we need to just advertise all the, all the jobs that we do”. And I was like, ​“that’s not what we do here”. And they were like, ​“but that’s what we like to do”. So then between us, we redeveloped the youth group. Instead of it being what I call a play youth group, we changed it into a volunteering youth group. A massive change. So all the young people changed. So they could sign up and they could find a volunteering project that matched their interests, and we started a reward system. So once they earned so many hours, they could cash it in. At the start, it was for free food, a free trip or a free camp. And we went from 35 to, I think, the highest we had before COVID, was 189. 

Chris Allen

Wow. Well, obviously Big Local’s coming towards the end. What are your hopes as you move forward into you know, beyond Big Local? Obviously, this work is going to continue. You’ve got all these different things in the community. But what about what about yourself? What you’re going to do next? 

Sue Merriman

Well, I want to stay with the young people personally. So the youth group has transformed even further now. It’s now changed its name to Visions Youth Services. It caters for young people that don’t go to school. It has a fishing youth group. It has a forest school. It does school holiday programmes. So we’ve just, we’ve just put a bid into the lottery to see if we can get some funding for some staff. Our dream would be to change the small there’s a small football club on site at the park, and our dream would be to turn it into like a sports College, which would accommodate that in the day and young people in the evening. 

Chris Allen

Well you’re pretty good at making your dreams come true. 

Sue Merriman

That’s my mission. 

Chris Allen

That was Sue Merriman, who is the worker at Brereton Million, which is in Rugeley in Staffordshire. I love, always love her optimism about making things happen. Very determined lady. And what were your reflections Beth? 

Beth Lazenby

Yeah, I think similarly, just what stood out was her commitment and passion for helping young people in the area. And sometimes putting herself in quite challenging and dangerous situations to be that sort of community face for people to start engaging with. And I think that’s what we’ve seen so often from Big Local areas, is that having those familiar faces within the community really helps people to start engaging and changing their behaviours. So yeah, lots of the seed to be really proud of there. 

Chris Allen

Indeed, and cutting through some very difficult subjects in many Big Local areas face in terms of the behaviour of young people. But it shows that when you do reach out and when you do make that great effort and make that great sacrifice, that something can be done in partnership with some of the statutory organisations, but giving new options, new roads for young people. 

Beth Lazenby

Yeah, I completely agree. And also, what an achievement for them to have created their own wellbeing app and for that to be being rolled out more widely. So so much ambition being shown by Brereton Million. 

Chris Allen

Indeed. So where can we find out more? 

Beth Lazenby

So we’ll pop all the information about the Big Local partnership in the show notes, so you’ll be able to find out more about their work. 

Chris Allen

Thanks Beth. And next week is the last in our current series, and I had the opportunity to pop in on somebody I’ve worked with the last 11 years. I won’t say where yet, but find out next week. Beth, and I look forward to you joining us next time on the Community Power Podcast, brought to you by Local Trust, discovering what happens when you give local people the power, the money and the assets to make a difference to their neighbourhoods.