Our work

We work with Newport City Council and with the wider community in promoting fairness in our city. Sometimes this means commenting on what the Council does, and providing people who work there with tools to help fair decision-making. More widely, it means finding ways of encouraging the people of Newport to think about why fairness matters, and how we can achieve it.

We can’t tell people what to do – we are not elected officials. Instead, our role is to shine a light and encourage reflection and debate. We want to help Newport have a better conversation about fairness. And we’d like that conversation to involve as many people as possible, across the communities of Newport. We think everyone deserves their say, and that our city will work better with everyone participating.

The following are some examples of the kinds of contributions we make.

Community engagement

We have regularly consulted with groups such as the Newport Youth Council, the Newport 50+ Forum and Community Connectors working with the Council, to get a sense of how issues look from their different points of view.
During the Covid 19 pandemic, we facilitated workshops looking at the impacts of the virus and the various lockdown measures on different parts of the community.
We have helped devise and steer a series of participatory budgeting schemes, in which members of the community have been invited to make proposals for how resources are to be spent.
We have run stalls at events such as the Maindee Festival, inviting members of the public to tell us what fairness means to them.
We have organised screenings of films with fairness-related themes.

Training, development and teaching for Councillors, Council employees and students

We have developed a training package for Councillors and Council employees, to help them reflect on the role of fairness in their work, and how to incorporate considerations of fairness in the decisions they make.
We contribute to teaching at the University of South Wales, on the BA (Hons) Youth and Community Work – providing sessions on fairness and why it matters for students at each stage of their degree.

Responding to Newport City Council's budget proposals

Each year, for the past ten years we have responded to the Council's budget proposals, highlighting the implications for fairness, using our 'principles'. Our response is submitted to Cabinet before they make their final budget decisions.