A Message from our partners in Queen’s University

Queen’s Communities and Place is a new initiative based on partnership between communities, policymakers and Queen’s University. Using academic and first-hand knowledge from the community, we will focus on a ‘place-based’ approach to co-create new solutions that address challenges to the community and our hope is that together we create a model of community and place-based working tailored to the Market, which will bring long lasting change.

Over the last decade, our academics have worked with a diverse set of communities, and despite divisions of many kinds, the same key concerns keep emerging such as declining educational and employment opportunities, falling living standards and widening inequalities. We want to address these and find out why.

We began our partnership with the Market Development Association during the first lockdown and this was formalised in October 2020 when we jointly signed a community engagement agreement. Since then we have been working with Mr Flynn in the Primary School and held meetings with Ms Moore in the nursery and Ms Donnelly in the SureStart to look at how we can find lasting solutions that tackle disadvantage and improve outcomes for children, young people and the community.

From February 2022 we will be holding engagement events with the residents of the Market to hear your views on how what we are going to do should be directed and your areas of concern. We will be in the community regularly so no doubt you will be seeing us around.

We are privileged to have this opportunity to work in such a historically rich, thriving and vibrant community and are grateful to all of you who have helped us establish, what we believe will be, something different and transformational to many within the Market.