How Citizen Partnerships co-produce projects with Yamato City in Japan

Performance Indicators

From 2003 to 2006 citizen groups proposed 47 projects, of which 23 were recommended by the Citizen Partnership and 20 were finally chosen by the mayor.

Interviews revealed that in the first four years of the Citizen Partnership the citizens involved often found it difficult to agree with each other on which project should go ahead. For the local government, public participation and service co-production was also a new concept. For example, in Japan local government has been traditionally responsible for social care. So when a citizen group proposed a project to provide social care to Disabled People this was perceived as a threat to the in-house local government service.

1. Childcare support

After cooperation with city government officers, the nonprofit organisation was able to provide a much higher level of service - in 2011 they handled 3483 service requests and provided total activities of 5508 hours. After the start of the project the nonprofit organization  was encouraged by the city government to undertake some further activities in child care, e.g. to make direct contacts with families which have serious problems. This has worked very well, so that now the nonprofit organisation is able to give the city government up-to-date information on the actual situation of these families and their problems, so that timely interventions can be made, where necessary. Members of the families who have used the services have subsequently joined the nonprofit organisation as members and started to work for it to help new users.

2. Community centre management project

The community centre now uses school facilities such as the kitchen and an arts and crafts room, opening them for citizens after school hours. The number of users in 2011 was 20,308.

The citizen group now provides some courses at the community centre, including courses organised and taught by members of the citizens’ group (111 courses and 673 participants in 2011), courses organised by the citizen group but delivered by a professional teacher (18 courses and 309 participants in 2011), and  courses where other citizens organise the course and teach themselves (33 courses and 219 participants in 2011).

As there are a lot of foreign people around the school, the NPO has undertaken some international projects, e.g. for  teaching the Japanese language and running classes on Japanese culture for foreign children, in cooperation with city government officers.

3. Child care advisors

The NPO now has a remit from the city government which allows them to organise some courses on child care for families in a large local supermarket. Although there are no specific impacts identifiable from this project, both the nonprofit organisation and city government officers recognise it as having been successful.