Community Action Planning

What is a Community Action Plan?

• An assessment undertaken by a community to reflect the needs and aspirations of local people – your assessment, your needs, your plan

• A developing and evolving process resulting in ACTION to benefit the community

Benefits of Community Action Planning

• Identifies what’s important to the community through a process led and controlled by the community

• Gets people engaged and involved. Identifies and recruits stakeholders and activists

• Supports existing / future community groups and projects

• Evidences what the community needs and where help may be needed from agencies

• To get people thinking positively – What’s good about living in your community? What do you value? What do you want to protect?

Community Action Planning - How is it done?• Set up a steering group

• List the issues and drivers for the process that you know already

• Identify key people you think would be able to contribute

• Agree a process – to involve as many people as possible

• Get wide input

• Feed back your findings

• Prioritise findings if necessary

• THEN implement the plan

– no point doing it otherwise

Community Action Plans - Scope

• Get people thinking broadly and creatively

• Use community planning themes to group responses:

o Community Wellbeing – includes health and wellbeing, housing, social services, community safety and community facilities

o Jobs and the Economy – includes business development, heritage, tourism and rural development

o Lifelong Learning – includes education, adult learning, and culture

o Sustainable Environment – includes environment, waste management, heritage, waste management, transportation and energy efficiency

o Developing our Partnerships – includes working between communities and statutory and other agencies, and working between agencies for communities.

Community Action Plans -

Things to remember

• Individual Community Action Plans reflect differences in community size, issues and

aspirations

• Can be time-consuming but with valuable outcomes

• Only worth doing if actions are then delivered

Community Action Plans – How MAP can help

• Time and energy to support and advise the group

• Some principles and a framework that you can adapt to your needs

• Experience of working with other communities

• Access to money for the expenses of the process and publication of the plan

• Potential access to small grants (<£1K) to help get projects started, and advice on sources of larger grants.