Your Voice Your Town: Ealing Council

Ealing Council’s Your Voice, Your Town (YVYT) is a new community-led model for change powered by communities.  It supports local action and decision-making on things that matter most to people across the borough’s seven towns. The model aims to empower residents, community organisations, businesses, and councillors to shape their local area through collaboration, grassroots leadership, and practical, community-driven solutions.  This approach aims to unlock the skills, energy, and potential in each town to drive forward change powered be community. 

Over the past year, Ealing Council led a borough-wide development process to shape Your Voice, Your Town (YVYT), engaging over a thousand of residents in conversations about their communities and celebrating what’s working well as well as identifying areas for improvement. Through this collaborative approach, residents helped shape the programme, identifying ways that they wanted to engage with the Council and voting on their top priorities for change. As a result of this towns have identified local priorities such as  cleaner streets and feeling safer in their neighbourhoods.

To take this work forward, each of Ealing’s seven towns have now established a Your Voice, Your Town Town Team. The role of the town teams is to lead on local priorities, plan activities and to encourage wider involvement to ensure that decisions are made with and by the community. As a result, local communities are at the heart of local decision making. 

1. Town Teams – Local Decision-Making Bodies

Each of the seven towns has established a Town Team to lead local decision-making and set priorities. These teams—made up of residents, community and faith groups, businesses, and councillors—meet regularly and have focused on designing community-led grant funds that respond to priorities chosen by residents. All Town Team members sign up to a participation agreement which outlines their roles and responsibilities. Each Town Team has agreed its own ways of working, tailored to local needs and opportunities, that supports effective teamwork.

Each Town Team is composed of:

Up to 20 members per team for effective collaboration including:

Residents (6–9): Provide practical steer on what change matters, represent diverse communities and act as connectors.

Voluntary & Community Sector (up to 3): Support practical development of projects and build engagement.

Faith Groups (up to 3): Mobilise participation through strong community ties.

Businesses (up to 3): Offer economic insight, support local enterprise and understanding of their local community.

Local Councillors (2–5): Advocate, connect stakeholders, and support problem-solving (membership reviewed annually).

2. Working Groups

Working Groups will be formed to lead specific projects or focus areas. These groups will receive support (and potentially funding) from Town Teams to deliver targeted initiatives. This part of the structure is still in development.

3. Community Activists and Navigators

Community activists and navigators will be involved in future projects to help bring in diverse voices, build connections, and encourage wider participation. Their role will be to reach into communities, spark conversations, and contribute skills to local initiatives. This element is also in the planning phase.

Council officers support and facilitate by supporting the local community to lead whilst being fair and inclusive in their approach.  Council officers also help to mobilise council and other resources around the team and help galvanise access to data, information and insights to shape the team’s work. 

In the first year, an annual budget of £480,000 has been allocated. This funding is allocated to each Town, based on population size.

Operating YVYT requires a combination of council staff time and dedicated funding for local projects. Resources are provided through a mix of council support and community-led efforts, with Town Teams playing a central role in coordinating activities and decision-making.  Town Teams also hope to leverage in other resources from local communities, including local people, business, community and faith organisations to achieve their aims. 

Each Town Team has agreed ways of working and meet regularly at least once a month. The Town Teams have been supported to develop their ideas and design their community funds in ways that suit local needs and opportunities. 

Each Town Team has developed its own approach to awarding funding, guided by a shared set of principles. Six of the seven towns are running open community-led funds, with an application process that actively welcomes submissions from local groups, businesses and individuals to address their key local priority. 

Every Town Team has set out clear eligibility criteria, funding purposes, and conditions. These are publicly available alongside the application forms on the Do Something Good website, under each town’s dedicated page. 

Five Town Teams will assess applications against published criteria, with larger grant applicants invited to meet with the team to discuss their proposals. One town is taking a more participatory approach with a community voting event planned for January 2026, allowing residents to choose which ideas receive funding. 

While Town Teams make recommendations, final funding decisions rest with council officers, who also carry out necessary checks and put grant agreements in place. To ensure this is community led, council officers would only go against recommendations in exceptional circumstances and would discussion the options and implications with the Town Team. 

To ensure residents can access the funding, each Town Team has published guidance and application materials on the Do Something Good website. Town Teams are leading on a wide array of outreach efforts to help reach people and organisations who may not otherwise participate in these kinds of processes. These include posters and flyers in lots of community and public places, social media and email campaigns, and in-person events and support sessions including community celebration events. Dedicated contact details and sessions are also available for anyone needing help or advice with their application. 

Enablers of success:

• Strong communication and collaboration between residents, local groups, and council officers helped build trust and maintain transparency. Council officers play a key enabling role, supporting Town Teams with relevant information and guidance.
• Flexible voting methods, including digital options, made it easier for more residents to participate in setting town-level priorities.
• Engaging local residents, community organisations and business in their own spaces, at different times of the day, and using different methods, got positive feedback and helped to ensure we reached more people and who may not typically engage with these processes.
• Empowered Town Teams were supported to shape their own ways of working for example deciding meeting frequency, roles, and operational approaches—fostering ownership and local leadership.
• Town Teams have been supported with templates and core information but can also reshape processes and approaches to community funds to break down barriers and challenges the typical ways of doing things. 

Barriers and challenges:

• Engaging younger residents in Town Teams is something we haven’t yet designed for. Whilst there has been some youth involvement in some Town Teams, this is the exception. To make up for this, many Town Teams are engaging schools and young people’s organisations in the Community-led funding processes. Over the next year we will also look to better design youth involvement into the processes.
• Variations in capacity and experience across Town Teams led to inconsistencies in how forums operate, highlighting the need for tailored support.
• Uneven community infrastructure and engagement across towns meant some areas had strong networks and leadership, while others required more effort to build trust and participation.
• Ensuring that services can share information and data in usable and insightful for Town Teams, is not always easy.
• The importance of clear, regular and visible communications internally in the Council and externally in communities cannot be overstated. We have learned lots on how we might do even more.
• The Town Team is a high commitment ask for local communities, which doesn’t suit everyone. It’s important to make sure that there are a range of inclusive opportunities that work beyond the Town Team, to ensure a range of ways to get involved. 

Building trust and visibility around community-led change takes time and consistent effort. To build on progress and address emerging challenges, the following actions are planned:

• Provide tailored support for outreach and communications to strengthen engagement in each town.
• Help Town Teams prepare to assess funding applications, ensuring fair and informed decision-making.
• Explore ways to extend the model to include working groups and activists, using funding to support volunteering and social action.
• Encourage Town Teams to consider their broader role beyond funding, such as hosting community safety sessions or supporting local initiatives.
• Review and reflect on learning to refine the model and inform future development. This model will evolve year on year to improve how it works, and to enable more change powered by communities. 

• Choose 'Your Voice, Your Town' priority: Around Ealing
• Your Voice Your Town

Carrie Deacon, Assistant Director Connected Communities

Email: [email protected]