In April 2022, the Home Office announced three years of funding for a Violence Reduction Unit in Cleveland.
The unit – named Cleveland Unit for the Reduction of Violence (CURV) – takes a partnership approach to reducing serious violence across the force area.
Work is carried out in collaboration and in line with set objectives outlined in the Home Office’s published Response Strategy.
CURV’s strategic needs assessment
CURV’s Strategic Needs Assessment highlighted:
- Central, Newport, Parkfield & Oxbridge, and Stockton Town Centre as having the highest proportion of serious violence taking place in public, outdoor locations. Those wards also tend to have high overall volumes of serious violence.
- Young people surveyed most frequently identified outdoor spaces as being places they do not feel safe.
Community Voice
The Home Office grant agreement identifies that the Community Voice should be included in delivery, stating:
“VRUs will support a multi-agency, public health approach to preventing and tackling serious violence, which is;
- Focused on a defined population, with and for Communities;
- Not constrained by organisational or professional boundaries,
- Focussed on generating long term as well as short term solutions. They will be based on data and intelligence to identify the burden on the population. This will include any inequalities, and rooted in evidence of effectiveness to tackle the problem”.
The Home Office grant agreement also states that an expectation of delivery and an area of ministerial focus is the ‘co-production and the integration of youth and community voices into delivery’.
CURV’s community engagement team takes a multi-layered approach to increase understanding of community concerns in the identified wards.
This approach includes fieldwork, surveys, and community events to gather the feedback from as many residents, business owners and stakeholders as possible.
Stockton and Middlesbrough-based voluntary development agencies (VDAs) have established community links in the target wards areas.
Funding
As a result, CURV will provide Catalyst and Middlesbrough Voluntary Development Agency (MVDA) with £15,000 each to set up a small grants fund for the purpose of empowering the community’s voice
Details will be confirmed at the end of the community engagement in the two identified wards.
Funding will be given to community groups to build community resilience and cohesion as well as improve the perception, and fear of violent crime.
Catalyst and MVDA will manage the funding on behalf of CURV programme. Each agency will be given a management fee of 15% of the total grant. This adds a further £4,500 to the funding.
A total of £34,500 for the financial year 2024/25 has been approved and divided equally between Catalyst and MVDA.
DRF 2023-24 – 0048: CURV Community Voice Funding (application, 202kB)