With £281,000 for the community, Sheffield Homes asks the residents how to spend it.

In partnership with Sheffield Homes Area Boards and the Sheltered Advisory Panel (SHAP) Sheffield City Council launched a new initiative for Council estates across Sheffield in 2009/10. The drive was to invest in safer, stronger communities and to enhance the quality of the environments. Individual tenants, community and voluntary groups, Tenants and Residents Associations and Statutory agencies were invited to bid for the money through a small presentation. 42,000 tenants and over 470 community and voluntary groups across Sheffield were contacted and asked to participate.

Seven events, one per area of Sheffield, are booked to judge the bids with the competitors each giving a short presentation to win support for their projects. At the first event at the Bramall Lane Football Ground bids included a community garden project, a play scheme for school holidays and an over 50s activities project. Presentations were kept brief, some just spoken others supported with PowerPoint slides or a series of excellent and sometimes all too pertinent images to support the bids. To make the voting fair and transparent to all Sheffield Homes decided to pose the following two questions after each presentation.

Each resident was given an interactive handset with which they could register their vote. It was decided not to show the results of the voting immediately as this might put undue pressure on the upcoming presenters. After all the presentations had taken place the results were revealed with those having the most "Strongly Agree" votes, suitably weighted against the number of voters present at that time, securing the amount of money listed for their project. Several projects were successful in securing the necessary funds through this participatory budgeting scheme.

This series of events across Sheffield is supported by the Optivote Conference Hire team. It was first agreed that the RF8 handset with its one button press operation would best suit the needs of the demographic. Sheffield Homes already own several sets of this particular system in other departments so are familiar with its fast and reliable performance. The new Optivote dual screen system which offers a control screen to the operator and a display screen to the audience was used successfully. The operator can see the PowerPoint slides as a show list and the current slide as a pop up image. The voting response grid can be displayed on either screen along with a response counter. Once all the presentations had been given and all the voting completed the results were immediately available and the awards could be given. Richard Gilson, Housing Coordinator Central Area, Sheffield Homes commented "The Optivote staff have been very supportive throughout the lead up to the event and on the day of the event itself. They have worked with The Sheffield Homes Staff and understood what we were aiming to achieve, and together we ensured we were successful in these aims"

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