Parks and open spaces build communities

The recent headline in CYP Now - A fifth of deprived children never spend time in nature - struck a chord with me as it's an issue we've been tackling head on in Blackpool.

With seven miles of golden sands and blue flag beaches, you wouldn't think access to the great outdoors would be a problem for Blackpool families. Unfortunately, as we know from the study this story reported on, this is not the case.

Blackpool, as part of the National Lottery investment in A Better Start (ABS), is to remedy this by working with our communities to find out how best to transform our outdoor spaces. It would have been easy to buy vast amounts of early years play equipment and helicopter it into our parks, placing it where we thought was best. However, at the heart of our approach is community consultation and co-production, and we've learned that to achieve long-term sustainability and "buy in", the community needs to be equal partners in all decision making.

Without engaging our communities to find out how they wanted to use their parks, the equipment would either be redundant or vandalised within a short space of time. That's why, at the Blackpool Centre for Early Child Development, we play the long game, working with the parks department, local community groups and schools to find out what funding and plans everyone has, and bring people together to decide how best to spend the available funding to everyone's advantage.

The result of our first major park development is that 18 months on since redeveloping the park from a no-go area, it is now the hub of the community with police reporting minimal antisocial behaviour. The park is used daily by a range of community members running gardening clubs, a Dad's for Life group making furniture to donate to our children's centres and libraries, and families having picnics. The community now feels ownership of the park and take great pride in it.

Families using the park are engaged in activities by the Early Years Park Rangers, employed by the parks department but funded from the ABS Partnership, who are trained in Forest School activities and brain science. They are complemented by junior park rangers, young volunteers who support and encourage their peers to get involved in outdoor activities and hopefully imbibe the next generation of parents with a love of nature and the outdoors to pass onto their children.

The best example of community ownership was a Twitter message I received on a Saturday from a parent who thought a bolt was loose on a piece of equipment and then reported it to the parks department. When I arrived into work on Monday, the parks department had already left me a message to say that a full check had taken place on all equipment. That's what I call community empowerment.

Merle Davies is director of the Blackpool Centre for Early Child Development