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The Community Enterprise Centre Cottingham Road, Hull HU5 2DH 01482 854550 (option 1)

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Registered office
The Community Enterprise Centre, Cottingham Road, Hull HU5 2DH.
Company number 3111401.
Registered in England and Wales.
Registered as a charity in the United Kingdom
Charity number 1086502

Our History

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Hull DOC first saw the light of day in a living room when a small group of concerned individuals ‘The DOC Founders’, Dave Rogers, Liz Shepherd, Ian Holmes, Roslyn Abbott and Andy Dorton pondered the dearth of community development in Hull. Whilst Hull was still many light years away from community development as we now know it, a new hope was nurtured and created from the seemingly chaotic symbols and words produced on a sheet of used flip chart paper. A bid was made to the Government’s Single Regeneration Budget Round 1 (SRB1) through Hull CityVision, Hull’s regeneration partnership now known as Hull and East Yorkshire Community Foundation. The bid was successful and enabled the organisation to commence its work in the City and embark on its adventure. In January 1996 the organisation recruited a Team Co-ordinator, three Community Development Workers and an Administrator. Like everything, it started with an idea and a very few of us made the idea happen, and behold it was 1996 and it was good! How we pulled of that first big SRB1 bid would have been amazing if it hadn’t really been about how pathetic the practice of ‘community development’ was in Hull at the time. So we thought we’d done well and ‘the authorities’ disagreed. But we got on with it with a wonderful band of staff. AGM’s were hilarious; five different communities arguing up ‘their worker’ because they thought so much of them. Hull DOC didn’t matter, it was a bit of scaffolding that allowed a great worker to get with great people and struggle to do something about the state of things. I don’t care that I can’t remember the details; I remember the feeling, the sense of community; the in it in struggle togetherness – the people and the arguments and the terrible times. This wasn’t moving forward (it wasn’t invented then), this was life. We now had to start delivering outputs in the 94/95 financial year. Strong political forces were ranged against DOC from its very inception. Threats of withdrawing funding, accusations of underachieving, concerns over personalities within DOC, refusal to allow us to recruit two posts not filled during initial recruitment. This was what the organisation was faced with in its first few weeks. On top of all this we had to achieve a full year’s outputs in 3 months, including provision of a cultural experience for over 72,000 people! Guess what – we did it. At this time Hull DOC also negotiated the management of the Community Chest funding which offers support to community groups with bright ideas that will benefit community cohesion. This programme was the first of its kind in the UK to be distributed using a local voluntary sector organisation in partnership with local people. We oversaw the equitable distribution of more than £75,000/annum. From modest beginnings additional projects soon added to the programme to extend the scope (geographically and in terms of communities of interest) of the organisation. Hull DOC was successful in bidding for community capacity building and community chest in eight out of 10 Community Target Areas (CTAs) under Single Regeneration Budget 6 (SRB6). 25 workers were recruited to further the pioneering community development work done by the original team. As well as taking innovative approaches to developing drug misuse prevention work, Community Focus has been particularly good at developing new youth work initiatives with local communities and has now established three youth work projects in the East Riding. By 2000 the two organisations were becoming increasingly aware of each other’s work, and of the similarity of approach that was being taken. Both organisations were rooted in a powerful determination to see lasting change, a determination to create a new order based on honesty, social justice, and the transfer of power from the powerful to the powerless. Community Focus workers found a profound agreement with the values expressed in Hull DOC’s ethos statement Our Approach to Community Development – and the decision to become one was taken. The night of the ninth Annual General Meeting was the launch of the new name branding. DOC - Developing Our Communities the new name which combined Hull DOC and Community Focus, along with the new name was a new look with a re-designed logo. Since that time the organisation has been astoundingly successful, growing at one time to become possibly the largest community development organisation in the country employing more than 60 staff across a very diverse range of projects.