You say regeneration and I say renaissance

I was brought up a bit short at Yorkshire Forward on Monday when someone made reference to the fact that somebody else didn’t know the difference between regeneration and renaissance.
How we laughed… but quietly I realised that I didn’t know either!
Walking around the Dearne Valley yesterday with Rachel, one of the Yorkshire Forward officers who have been showing me around, I was finally brave enough to ask her what she thought the difference was. The gist of what she said was that regeneration was fairly restricted to the economic well being of a place whereas renaissance was about all aspects of life, including how people thought and felt about where they lived. Today I am going to dig a bit more into this but in this splitting hairs about a definition there is maybe something that could engage faith communities in what we are about.
This has been illustrated to me clearly in the week so far. On Monday I went to the Dearne Valley to a meeting of principal partners in the Dearne Valley Regeneration process. There were lots of council officers and a team of consultants who did a great job in outlining the problems of this post industrial community. There was much talk of the lack of coherence between the different communities that were even split along authority lines with three district councils sharing responsibility for the Dearne.
Yesterday I visited the Dearne Valley centre, which hadn’t been mentioned on Monday but turned out to be a wonderful creative hotchpotch built by the community in a converted primary school. What became clear fairly quickly was that these people, particularly in the areas of sport and young people were working right across the whole of the Dearne. They were creating a sense of community and enabling people to feel good about where they lived. They had serious and measurable increase in the attainment of the young people with which they worked. Little of this had been acknowledged on the Monday because although individual schemes were local authority funded the centre itself wasn’t. This was renaissance in action, dealing with the whole person and the whole community.
Incidentally it turned out that the initiative for the centre had come from a local church, and although the local vicar still lead groups there it was clear that it was no longer a church initiative. I wonder why we are so good at starting but so shy about continuing in this kind of work. It could be that as volunteers we worry about sustaining projects in the long term. More worryingly it could be that this kind of community enterprise is perceived as having a better chance of survival if it stops being “religious.” My experience in other part so the world suggests otherwise, that with a strong volunteer base it stands a great chance of survival if people of faith are involved.
Maybe as in other areas of faith we simply lose our confidence.
Just had a conversation with someone from the Urban section of Yorkshire Forward who has come back with the following areas which mark out renaissance as different to regenration:
1. More emphasis on a 25 year plans and strategic development plans
2. Initial and ongoing consultation: creation of local teams of people from many sectors who are consulted on all plans.
3. Quality and added value…

This still all sounds a bit vague, I’ll have to do a bit more digging tomorrow.