The Citizenship and Integration Initiative (CII) was set up to ensure that Londoners of all backgrounds can contribute to the life of the city as active, socially integrated citizens. (CII) is a pooled fund to support work on citizenship and integration in the capital. A number of independent funders have and will continue to contribute to this fund which aims to raise and distribute £1 million over four years between 2017 and 2022. The Mayor of London has appointed a Deputy Mayor for Social Integration, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) have made an equivalent investment into their new Social Integration team. The first phase of CII is now complete and the funders involved are sharing the successes and learning from this and reaching out to others who may want to contribute to the pooled fund.
The overall aim of the CII is to support social integration in London. The objectives for the first two years were:
CII was designed to test a partnership model of working between civil society, the GLA and philanthropic funders. The model is based on a secondment scheme which places secondees employed in civil society organisations into the Social Integration team within the Communities and Social Policy Unit of the GLA. The secondment model was chosen to enable the GLA to draw on the strengths of civil society, facilitating culture change within the regional authority and a more informed approach to citizenship and integration issues. The aspiration is for this model to have a more lasting effect than less intensive partnership approaches (such as delivering joint projects without formal secondments).
Four part-time secondees were funded in the first year of the CII (April 2017- April 2018 ) and allocated to work on specific objectives linked to the overall aim.
Civic Engagement
- Shout Out UK has been appointed to create a set of materials on voter registration and
- political literacy which will be used as part of the London Curriculum with 16-18 year olds in schools.
Young Londoners
- A ‘Young Londoners Forum’ was hosted at City Hall, attended by 70 young people with insecure citizenship status.
Diversity, social contact and identity
- A new phase of work on welcoming new arrivals to London has been approved by the GLA.
For a full list of outcomes, you can read the Interim Report here.
Other funders (such as trusts and foundations, local authorities and central government) are invited to join the pooled fund.
Those interested can get in touch with Sioned Churchill at Trust
for London (Sioned@trustforlondon.org.uk).