EVC May Event: West Midlands RCAN on Rurality and Empowerment
Posted by Andrew Brightwell on 17th May 2010
Lorna Pearcey of West Midlands RCAN
Lorna Pearcey of West Midlands Rural Community Action Network (RCAN) has been delivering a project on community-led planning called Rurality and Empowerment. Its aim is to help communities to be able to affect the decision-making processes in their local area.
Communtiy Led Planning
Lorna says that the community-led planning approach is a way of making sure that services providers, such as local authorities, are engaging with their local communities in a constructive and productive way. Lorna called it a tool for engaging with local communities on the issues that affect them, so they can make action plans to change the places where they live. The Community-led planning group works very closely with the parish council, Lorna said.
As Lorna explained, the community-led planning approach has been developed for the last three years in rural areas. This year RCAN has been looking to replicate the work done in rural areas and develop a consistent approach across the West Midlands region. She said it’s a way of trying to embed the approach in a very different geographic environment.
A briefing paper was produced with case studies to educate people about the process. They worked to put together case studies demonstrating the claims made for CLP.
Then they attempted to embed a consistent approach. They worked with CLP workers to find key issues for embedding a consistent approach, so in the future when people talk about CLP everyone will know what is meant. They decided to find best practice and then use that to draw together a tool-kit of guidance for improving CLP.
Chris Gooding
Lorna then handed over to Chris Gooding, Herefordshire Partnership, who works in the development and delivery of CLP. He was one of the CLP workers who Lorna worked with. He said he found it a very beneficial experience. He said having the debate with other practitioners helped to find out the small details of best practice across the whole process. He said that he learned a lot about the options for improving processes.
Chris said that there was consensus in the need for support for CLP in local authorities and service providers, which could now – with new funding – take place. Chris says he’s much more confident now that he can give the right message to the Local Strategic Partnerships.
Sophie Pryce of Community First
Sophie Pryce, who works for Community First, then spoke about how she found the project. She’s only been in her post for a short time. You can here from Sophie and her experiences here:
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/03/Sophie-Community-Led-Planning-March-16-2010.mp3[/podcast]
Learning outcomes
Lorna said that there have been significant learning outcomes from the work that the project has completed.
- Partnership approach is key to developing best practise in this area
- Regional variations impact enormously on the delivery of CLP – but the best practice lessons are being learned and transferred.
- Embedding this work through the LAs and LSPs is the biggest challenge and essential if this work is to have maximum impact.
You can listen to Lorna’s March interview:-
[podcast]http://rawm.podnosh.com/files/2010/03/Lorna-Pearcey-Interview-March-16.mp3[/podcast]