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This text presents a description of a project set up under the Home Office Safer Cities Programme to develop neighbourhood support strategies in an area of extensive social problems and high child protection referrals. It demonstrates how community development techniques can be used to involve local people in identifying problems and finding solutions to them - drawing on the strengths, skills and resources within communities. The project used a partnership model of professionals and local people, seeing parents as experts on their own family situations. Multidisciplinary strategies to improve health, safety and well-being were explored, as well as the major sources of stress in bringing up children in an area of high crime, ill health and disadvantage. The project showed that parents' (usually mothers) analysis of their own situation was as sophisticated as that of researchers in the area of family support and child protection. The solutions they proposed were more practical and cost effective than many of the approaches currently in operation. The project had been set up following concerns that child protection work was too narrowly focused on crisis intervention, ill health, high crime rate and child abuse. It anticipated the findings of the Audit Commission report "Seen But Not Heard" (1994) and the renewed emphasis in the Department of Health "Messages from Research" (1995) on the need for family support.