Afrikan Heritage Community Development in St Paul’s: The Maendeleo Project

With The Maendeleo Project, BSWN aims to champion and invest in the growth of grassroots and socially entrepreneurial change chosen by African Caribbean communities in St Paul’s, Bristol, in a 3-year programme. 

This project offers an opportunity for groups of individuals to come together in a community-defined, safe, facilitated and resourced space. People may have known each other for years, working on survivalist strategies and have operated without having the opportunity to recognise and build shared perspectives or action plans, nor devise collective models of working that contribute to shared values and objectives. 

The purpose of this proposal is primarily local residents to drive change in the community to ask the questions and build a vision of St Paul’s and our community’s voice, for lasting community benefit. We are seeking input into community-led solutions that really and truly resonate with African Caribbean communities themselves. 

Some resources are in place to both test and learn ideas and scale them up, if they can be shown to work and are viable. We are delighted that Bristol City Council, as a key stakeholder, is a keen participant, learner and support agency that is on the journey too. 

The Maendeleo Project is community-driven. The project will be supported by a Community Development Worker and led by a Steering Group, The Ongozo Circle, which embodies the values to build momentum and create conditions for sustainable impact in an uncertain world. 

The Project will be facilitated independently by Jendai Serwah. BSWN will provide support to service the project, and update funders and stakeholders along the way, to propel talks into action.

Background to The Maendeleo Project

The Maendeleo (My-En-Deh-Lay-Oh) Project is an Afrikan heritage Community Development Project funded by Bristol City Council’ Community Development Team and the  Quartet Community Foundation and is administered by Black South West Network. Maendeleo is a word from the Kiswahili language meaning progress or development.

The Maendeleo Project will work using an Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) model to explore, plan and facilitate development in Afrikan Heritage (also described as African-Caribbean, Caribbean, Black British etc) communities to facilitate the growth of grassroots and socially entrepreneurial change chosen by Afrikan Heritage Communities (AHC) primarily but not exclusively in St Paul’s, Bristol in a 3 year programme. The ABCD model looks to hold Afrikan Heritage knowledge, customs and traditions as primary drivers in the community journey towards solutions to community issues. The people and their knowledge, skills, experience, values and ancestral knowledge and wisdom are seen as the primary assets of the Maendeleo Project.

A Community Development Worker (CDW) is being recruited to engage, liaise and coordinate The Maendeleo Project and, using ABCD principles, will be backed by The Ongoza Circle (a Community Steering Group – Ongoza, a Kiswahili word meaning to guide, steer, lead) and a team of volunteers recruited by the CDW. The CDW’s role will be to hold space, draw out issues and facilitate the AHC group’s journey to find solutions through any traumas, history, conflict and find ways to overcome challenges. The CDW will encourage the best of the AHC community's cultural norms and traditions to think, organise and plan at blue sky levels to address current issues affecting AHC. 

During these 3 years, the CDW will work with external consultants, the Ongoza Circle, community volunteers, and Afrikan Heritage Community members to pilot some of the most reparative and transformational ideas in order to test these initiatives, learn from them and potentially increase in scale. To facilitate AHC engagement, the CDW will use a range of methods from door knocking, participatory events, to community radio to inspire and encourage limitless community imagination towards self-determined reparatory solutions to community concerns. 

Initial efforts made by the CDW over the first 4-6 months in post will result in ideas that are evaluated and strategies identified to pursue them. Ideas will be explored further and, subject to size, funded directly by the programme if small, in a test and learn programme.