By Santosh Rai
Increasing participation at community level improves local service delivery, raises local accountability and develops cohesive communities. But there is a mismatch between ambitions for governance and the reality of governance for black and minority ethnic women. There are many and varied motivations which lead them to contribute to community life, but frustration and dissatisfaction with the operation of local governance structures is a common reality. 

By Steve Sadler
Half a century of telecare has brought unimaginable developments in the support of people in their own homes and successfully improved the lives of millions. Older people and those with long term needs are able to continue to live at home well beyond past expectations. The author describes how smarter sensors and new ways of processing information mean that care teams are able to respond more proactively and effectively. 

By David Robinson, Kesia Reeve and Rionach Casey,
There is an increasingly divisive debate and media speculation about the motives of new immigrants and the priorities of statutory agencies and housing service providers. Many assumptions are made about the consequences for long-standing residents. Questions are raised about who gets what and why, and the knock-on effects for local neighbourhoods.
This article explores the arrival experiences and settlement stories of new immigrants. 

By Sandra Nutley
The clamour for evidenced based policy can be heard world wide. In the UK policies emerging from departments must have an evidence base. The author describes how a better understanding about social programme implementation, client experiences of those programmes, and the sources and causes of implementation failure are having an impact. 

By Julia Hirst, Eleanor Formby, Sadie Parr, Judy Nixon, Caroline Hunter and John Flint.
Young people are often unfairly demonised in current debates about anti-social behaviour. This article describes how reward schemes work and it looks at the effect of rewarding young people for pro-social behaviour and the positive contributions they can make to their communities. The authors also looked at the features that contribute to the success of reward schemes. 

By Martyn Goodhand
Bullying in schools has long been the elephant in the corner, an issue which all schools and local authorities are aware of, but which for some was a strict taboo, a subject that was not discussed in open forum, for fear of being branded as having “a bullying problem”. 

By Saffron James and Ed Cox,
The role ward councillors should play in community leadership and strategic decision making has become a pressing issue for local authorities in the context of current policy and legislative changes. This article investigates how the role is likely to change as neighbourhood working, legislative and policy changes impact on the role of local government. It identifies obstacles to developing new roles and the need for a culture change. 

By Anne E Green and Richard J White.
This article explores how young people’s attitudes towards education, training and work opportunities are shaped by their social networks and attachment to place, and looks at how interventions might widen their horizons and improve their prospects. There are ongoing policy concerns about deprivation of individuals, poverty relating to place and how to transform the prospects of deprived places. 

By Andrew Hind
This article was first published in Public Management and Policy and is reproduced by permission of the Association. http://www.cipfa.org.uk/pmpa/index.cfm
Government has ambitious plans to increase the involvement of charities in delivering public services. The Charity Watchdog discovered from a survey that bureaucracy and cost cutting is hurting charities. 

By David M. Allen,
Success and failure are closely inter-related, but to achieve continuous improvement there must be a focus on failing. There is a need to argue with success and not to believe that things are working as well as they could. It’s important to seek out evidence of failure, obsessively. Listen to customers.