Although there haven’t been updates here for a while.. we’ve been working away!
We’ve been working within the Falkirk area alongside Maddiston Community Council, Falkirk Council, Falkirk CVS, Community Learning and Development, Falkirk Trust as well as a range of local partners. A project plan has been collaboratively created with our partners in Falkirk which has four phases:
- To facilitate evidence gathering and action to support local improvements
We’re supporting the group to undertake a range of activities to gather evidence on what is important to local people including conducting a survey, qualitative interviews, engaging with school children and using social media
- To generate learning on processes that foster greater collaboration
We’re continuing to document our learning on collaborative decision making and are beginning to gather evidence from local partners of their experiences of collaborating with each other
- To engage successfully with local people, encouraging inclusivity and enabling all voices to be heard
Our engagement activities (see point 1) as well as the broad representation from relevant agencies on our project group enables useful links with local people.
- To move towards action/ co-design of solutions using creative engagement methods
Plans are in place to use the Detroit Soup model locally. This is a crowd-funding initiative where local groups pitch for the money raised by the entry price (including soup) that night – the idea is to support community-based projects to become real.
Here are a few comments from our partners:
Over the past three months we’ve….
“put together a plan of action. In the last few months we have worked hard to promote the project in the local area both at a community level but also by looking to inform and bring in agencies that work in the area that could benefit from knowing more about the local community. We have successfully reached out to wide range of groups in the community from members of the old folks association to pupils from the local High School. I think we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the willingness of people to go on camera to tell us what they think.”
“looking forward to seeing the analysis of the survey data and seeing what it shows about our community, including putting the video interviews together. I’m also looking forward to the Soup event and hope it’s successful. It would be great if it starts to get people thinking about coming together to be more involved in the community.”