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Portadown Local Action for Community Engagement (PLACE)

The Portadown Local Action for Community Engagement (PLACE) Initiative brings together community groups and residents associations from some of the most strongly loyalist communities in the Portadown area, several of which share a physical interface with Catholic communities. All of the communities have experienced violence of some sort over the last number of decades, leaving a legacy which includes paramilitary feuding, interface violence and considerable tension about the traditional marching season.

The PLACE Initiative began as a project to help these loyalist communities take more ownership of the decisions involving their areas and to improve the quality of life. Given the nature of the communities it is working in, perhaps inevitably the Initiative has to deal with sensitive political and cultural issues as part of this work.

PLACE approached the Fund in 2003 with a proposal for a new three year project which would focus on peace building in Portadown, beginning with the identification, recognition and addressing of sectarian attitudes and behaviour within an area and the preparation of the Protestant community to engage with other communities through confidence and capacity building initiatives.

PLACE used five distinct projects to deliver these objectives:

an environmental programme aimed at removing all offensive grafitti and paramilitary flags to reduce tensions within the community and at key interface areas. The programme was delivered through a series of community consultations.
a volunteer development programme to develop individuals’ potential to contribute positively to their own communities – this included community leadership training.
interface management – a number of individuals were recruited in the second and third years of the project for community relations and conflict management training to provide the community with
a skilled resource for dealing with conflict situations
a youth development programme to provide youth citizenship/mentoring for up to 15 young people each year
a community dialogue programme, providing a number of opportunities for key influencers in the community to meet in a
safe environment and to discuss some of the key issues affecting peace, stability and sectarianism.

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