ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the approaches and techniques of working with excluded neighbourhoods, helping to build structures and capacities on the ground enabling local residents to shape the renewal of their own localities. Capacity building helps a local area develop and strengthen local organisations, increasing levels of resident participation and engagement, and developing local leaders all with the purpose of strengthening the neighbourhood to the point where it can take control of its own affairs and articulate issues important to it. Before beginning any concerted neighbourhood work it is important to resist the temptation to undertake some form of immediate engagement and instead to think through what the objectives are of the work ahead. Volunteers give enormous amounts of time and energy taking part in executive boards of neighbourhood initiatives and community forums of all descriptions. In practice, then, it is often difficult to pinpoint where the community-based service ends and the community-level intervention begins.
