Preparing Citizens for Pandemic Response

The Lambeth Street Champions Scheme focussed on the environmental and waste management service sector. Specifically, the scheme looked to involve citizens in the upkeep and beautification of their street. Over the late summer and autumn of 2014, the council wrote to all residents on treatment streets and informed them that they could be appointed a ‘Street Champion’. The intention was to have multiple street
champions on a street. Street champions were expected to be responsible for efforts to help improve the cleanliness, beautification, and social cohesion of the street they lived on. This could include: coordinating neighbours to engage in street cleansing activities; picking up litter or campaigning for residents not to drop litter; clearing pavements of bins, detritus, and other debris; beautification activities such as painting walls, the creation of flower planters or communal gardens. Importantly, street champions were encouraged to identify their own priorities for improving street cleanliness, based on the needs and interests of the residents of that street.

One group of streets did not receive any communication beyond the ‘Do the Right Thing’ campaign (the control). This provides us with a set of study streets that reflect the status quo activities of Lambeth residents without appointment incentives. In the course of the one-year period on which we monitored such activities with the council, two Lambeth residents initiated street activities outside of our appointment
treatments, but both were in buffer rather than control streets. Residents of a second group of streets were invited to become street champions, but no further incentives were mentioned (pure appointment). The Council simply announced the scheme to them and invited
participation. This is our baseline appointment treatment. It does not make salient the appointment beyond simply appointing the individual a street leader and supporting them to undertake street activities.

In the pecuniary appointment treatment, the incentives were targeted at the individual street champion, who was offered access to costly council services for free. These services were provided to the street champions household only. For example, street champions were given free garden waste services for their household only, access to a range of council training courses, and so on. The benefit of the full set of
incentives to the individual was around £200. This is not sufficient to compensate the appointee for their intended efforts at market rates, but provided some form of financial compensation in kind. In the social appointment treatment, the incentives were targeted at the street as a whole, where similar council services would be provided to the street as a whole. In this case, waste collection services were provided for any green waste created by gardening the public spaces of the street and training was targeted at community issues relevant to the street as a whole. Plants and seeds were offered for planting on the street, and so on. The expected cost to the council of treating a single street with the full set of services on offer was approximately the same as in the prestige and pecuniary appointment schemes.

2020-03-15

2020-06-15

1) Whether the road has been flyered with information on support mechanisms.
2) Whether a WhatsApp group has been created for the street
3) Local newspaper/social media mentions of COVID-related community support activities on the street

We randomly distributed the 170 sample streets between these treatments. 30 streets were allocated each to the control and pure appointment arms. 37 streets were allocated to the pecuniary and social appointment treatments and the prestige appointment scheme was randomly chosen between the three additional incentives to receive 36 streets. The additional incentives were all allocated more streets than
the controls to increase our power to detect differences amongst these groups.

Randomization done in office by a computer

Street

No

170 streets

170 streets

170 streets