Once upon a time, a decade ago, there were ‘resident Forums’ in all wards of North East Lincolnshire. In some places, groups like OneVoice (in Immingham) and Haverstoe Forum; Park Forum and so on still exist. But not all these residents forums have lasted the years. South Ward – including Nunsthorpe, Grange and Bradley Park, has been without a resident Forum for a number of years.
VANEL is now actively working in the community and with local partners to get a new Forum up and running and engaging with residents so that local people have more of a voice and an involvement with local issues that matter to them.
The push for a new Forum came from partners such as the Police, Ward Councillors and LHP who wanted to ensure residents ‘had a voice’. And when Clear, Hold, Build started up in Nunsthorpe there was a further push to create a Forum as part of the ‘build’ phase of that programme. By building a Forum, the hope is to have new ways to reach residents but also to help empower them to engage with their community.
Ward Councillors kick started the project with some seed money to cover running costs of meetings and then VANEL applied to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (via NELC) and were successful in gaining funding to allow us a year of supplying Karl’s time to support the setup of a new group.
Eventually a venue was found – that neither favoured Nunsthorpe or Grange – and Grimsby Baptist Church on Laceby Road became our central, monthly meeting location.
Meetings have been running since September 2024 and will continue monthly. Each meeting is attended by a number of partners – Ward Councillors; Police; LHP; Oasis; church representatives; and others. The meetings are now chaired by a local resident and managed by Karl from VANEL to keep the sessions running and currently to deal with paperwork.
Now we’ve got the Forum up and running, the next objectives are both to increase the attendance from more and more residents themselves, and secondly, to work on getting more residents to take on running the meetings and running the Forum themselves.
This work will now be able to continue throughout 2025/26 thanks to some new funding to VANEL via NELC/Police which will enable Karl to remain in a support/management role for now.
The Forum is keen to not just be a ‘talking shop’! We’re identifying issues, problems, ideas and projects that we can then contribute to in a meaningful way. An idea for a fly tipping related event was raised and this went on to be led by Oasis and LHP doing April 2025 (supported by all the other partners) and this resulted in a hugely successful community engagement ’skip’ day near Easter collecting 17+tons of rubbish from the area.
Recently discussions are working on getting more bleed kits and defibrillators into the area too.
As the Forum becomes more formally constituted, we may even get to the position of applying for funding and running more local projects led directly by the Forum.
A website and discussion forum has been established online alongside the monthly meetings – see www.southwardforum.org.uk – and other initiatives continue within the South Ward area.
VANEL has long been involved with community cohesion, community connections, neighbourhood working and more. Working in South ward to help local partners and residents to establish a new way of working together is exactly how we hope to strengthen our communities.
Any questions about the South Ward Forum or about similar approaches, please contact Karl Elliott direct – karl@vanel.org.uk