IN DEPTH
Bringing banking back to the community for High Street boost
Community services help to bind society and create active and wel- coming spaces. Here Jeff Payne, Director of Community Junction (CJ), explores how an innovative approach to community engage- ment, originally developed in Australia to tackle reduced access to banking, can be adapted for the UK to help reverse a decline in high streets – and public libraries could be the perfect partners.
EVIDENCE shows that 43 per cent of adults struggle to read and understand written or digital health information, that percentage increasing to 61 per cent when numbers are included. With literacy clearly a problem, those people are unable to fully connect with healthcare services.
It is a national disgrace when roughly half the population – 35 million, when children are counted – can’t gain access to informa- tion, which will give them longer lives in good health. NHS England and CILIP have joined forces in an eff ort to improve health and digital literacy, with eight Library groups chosen to test out diff erent ways in which this objective can be achieved, CILIP managing and coordinating the programme (
https://bit.ly/3XTKPdz). Suff olk Libraries, one of the eight, has posed a simple, yet critical question, the answer to which will determine the success or failure of the project – “How do we reach out to non-library users?”
CJ has formulated a series of mechanisms capable of delivering the following:
l regeneration of town centres, their high streets, local communities and economies;
January-February 2023
Jeff Payne (
jeff.payne@
communityjunction.co.uk), Director of Community Junction.
l fi nancial and digital inclusion, health equity – for all;
l connection of signifi cant numbers of economically inactive young people with mainstream social and economic activity, thus resolving the NEETs problem.
These outcomes, which didn’t initially include health equity, were to be delivered via the restoration of a network of commu- nity-owned, remodelled bank “branches” as catalyst, delivering and supplying a range of relevant products, services and opportunities above and beyond banking and fi nancial services.
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 33
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