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INT8 - Celebrating diverse communities

INT8 - Celebrating diverse communities

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Overview

The Plan helps to shape Plymouth as a fair city where people take pride in their communities, are listened to and can make a real contribution to Plymouth as a place to live, work and visit.

Photo by Rafaela Biazi
Photo by CoWomen
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

This Policy belongs to

Policy

As the city grows and attracts new international businesses, visitors and students, Plymouth will need to strengthen its reputation as a welcoming, multicultural city where a broad range of partners promote the benefits of diversity and challenge unfair discrimination. Plymouth will be a fair city where people take pride in their communities, are listened to and can make a real contribution to Plymouth as a place to live, work and visit. The city will:

  1. Ensure that the needs of different communities of geography, identity and interest are respected, celebrated, and valued for and enabled in their contribution to the economy and culture of the city.
  2. Ensure that people feel safe and secure, with good levels of community cohesion and where people from different backgrounds get on well together.
  3. Ensure that as service providers it understands and responds to the needs of all Plymouth's communities and service users.
  4. Ensure that all communities have access to contribute to, lead and develop place based projects in the city and this work is profiled and supported accordingly.
  5. Ensure that young people are prepared for a life in a modern, globalised and increasingly diverse Britain, enabling them to take up their roles in the Plymouth of the 21st Century.
  6. Deal with hate crime effectively and efficiently.

Rationale

If Plymouth is to fulfil its city vision to ensure that an outstanding quality of life is enjoyed by everyone and deliver an ambitious growth agenda, it must strengthen its reputation as a welcoming city with good community cohesion. Community cohesion is a state of harmony between people from different backgrounds living within a community and is strongly linked to the concept of social capital. A socially cohesive society is one that 'works towards the wellbeing of its members, fights exclusion and marginalisation, creates a sense of belonging, promotes trust and offers its members the opportunity of upward mobility' (OECD 2012:14). Strong and positive relationships are developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances, in the workplace, schools and within neighbourhoods. 'Guidance on community cohesion' (LGA, December 2002) and 'Community cohesion - an action guide' (LGA, 2004).

As the population of Plymouth grows, it will become more diverse with a growing number of people from different backgrounds. It is therefore essential that we celebrate this diversity, harness talent and ensure an outstanding quality of life for everyone – newcomers and established populations alike. Our approach will help ensure Plymouth has a strong reputation and is an attractive, safe place to live, visit, work and invest in, and one which understands and provides for different cultural needs.

The city will also look to promote the effective teaching of Citizenship Education across all our schools which will support the increased awareness, knowledge and understanding of Plymouth's diverse cultural profile. Children and young people in the city will therefore be active and informed members of their communities able to appreciate, celebrate and exploit the links between the Plymouth of the 21st Century and the rest of the world.

Delivery and related documents

Vision

An International City

This is about how the city projects itself to the wider world, to people who might invest in or visit the city, the sense of pride that local people take in their city and how Plymouth’s businesses engage with an increasingly global market place.

Open Vision Stroke 1 Copy An international city

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