Building confidence with public consultation
- Overcame initiative overload and attracted 200+ people to event
- Managed first city-wide roll out for national programme
- Involved stakeholders and partners
- Ran introductory training courses for legal professionals
- Zero to 20% awareness in three months
From its pilot on a city estate, we rolled out Community Justice with public consultation and stakeholder engagement programmes across Leicester and in Cheshire.
hopwood managed a programme of activity to introduce people to the concept. The approach was to build confidence in the criminal justice system by involving local people in it, by open forums, and introducing magistrates into the community then demonstrating that this was happening to the wider community with a concerted PR campaign. This included local PR, leafleting, posters, events, running the judiciary in the community programme, attendance at Joint Action Group and Area Forum, one-to-one briefings with local stakeholders.
Despite the fact that this area was known to be suffering from “initiative overload”, hopwood successfully created a favourable reception to the concept and a 20% awareness (non-prompted in independent survey) within a few months, and built on this with a range of initiatives including a major court Open Day. Meanwhile, the agency ran a separate programme to manage internal communications within the LCJB – police, courts service, probation etc – and the relevant stakeholder community, including city council anti-social behaviour unit, Safer Leicester Partnership, drug and alcohol action teams and Victims & Witnesses Support.
