25 years of bringing Newham people together:
Conflict and Change was established in 1984 by local volunteers as a response to the social tensions arising from economic change and population shift in Newham, East London. They saw that people from diverse backgrounds were living side by side without knowing each other and wanted to find ways to build trust while respecting differences. The charity began life as (what would now be called) a community mediation service, the first to be set up in the UK. Conflict & Change has evolved greatly over the years, becoming widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of conflict resolution.
Founder members Paul Regan and Steven Lowe set the scene of 1984:
“Newham was wrestling hard with the communities undergoing rapid cultural, social and economic change, and there was little going on to help people understand what was happening. Our idea was that if enough people in the community could intervene at an early enough stage, conflict could be channeled away from violence and into something more constructive."
Over twenty-five years later Newham continues to experience many of the same social tensions felt when the project began. Since then Conflict & Change has developed greatly, in terms of size and in the range of work that we undertake, enabling us to better respond to the needs of Newham’s people.
Some of Conflict & Change's first mediators back in the late 1980's (right).
The early days:
The “Newham Conflict and Change Project” (NCCP), as it was originally known, was set up by two local community leaders: Paul Regan (at that time Chief Executive of the Newham Community Renewal Programme, later Chief Executive of Aston-Mansfield) and Stephen Lowe (now Bishop of Hulme and the Church of England’s first Bishop for Urban Life and Faith), with important support from the project's first Coordinator, Jonathan Gosling (now a professor and Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter). Paul and Stephen had noted increasing levels of tension and conflict in the local community in Newham, and after extensive consultation with Newham residents they became convinced of the need for a project to involve local residents in solving local community conflicts.
The early approach to conflict was an experiment as at that time there was no recognised model for “community mediation”. What Paul and Stephen did was to organise four workshops for the public, from which they recruited 18 people to attend a four-day residential in November 1983. These then became the first volunteer “conciliators” when Conflict and Change started work in 1984 who began responding to requests by local people in dispute.
Our early work was supported by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, which in 1986 published a paper called "Conflict and Reconciliation: the Newham Experiment", and also by a visit to New York to find out about similar USA initiatives.
Celebrations in 1998 with local volunteers and a council official (left) and newer members join in 2006 (below right).
Mediation and much more:
In the meantime the work was gradually developing, building upon our community mediation work and combining the skills learnt with other methods of conflict resolution. In 1986 work started in four secondary schools which eventually led to the peer mediation programme that formed the basis of the work of our Children and Young People’s team. Then in 1988 the organisation ran its first “Introduction to Conflict Management” (ICM) course for volunteers. This was refined over time, and ten years later in 1998 we appointed a Volunteer Training Officer. This post was the start of what has now become our Training team, offering a much broader training provision. In 2000 we extended into a fourth area of work (alongside mediation, schools work, and training) with the appointment of a Community Development Officer, whose task was to build bridges and networks between a range of small ethnic and faith-based community groups. Since then our Community Development work has become increasingly central to our developing role as a capacity-building organization. Since 2006 this work has been greatly complemented by our Community Conversations project, that seeks to encourage safe and supportive dialogue between groups of people that would not normally mix.
We currently employ nine full time and six part time staff and have a wonderful team of over 50 volunteers. Volunteers have always been right at the heart of our work, being the best way to remain connected with the communities we serve. We now increasingly recognise our volunteering as a further, fifth area of our work.
