Community Planning FAQ's
Q. What is a community plan?
A. A Parish Plan is an holistic document which brings together the views, needs and opinions of the whole community, covering social, economic and environmental issues of relevance to local communities. It provides an opportunity for the community to state its views and provide information regarding how people feel about where they live. The end result should be a plan that sets out what the community would like to see for the future and what steps need to be taken to make it happen.Q. What are the real advantages of doing a community plan?
A. Not only will producing a plan help bring a community closer together (and we can give real examples of where this happens), it can also prove beneficial in some of the following ways: It provides a plan for action to help improve things for local communities. It can help address local needs through the planning process, for example affordable housing. And it can provide evidence to support funding bids for local initiatives.Q. What does it take to produce a Parish Plan?
A. It takes a core group of between 8-12 people, plus lots of other volunteers to help. Anyone interested in their community can be involved. It involves talking to as many people as possible from the community to find out what they think about the place they live in.Q. Why should we do one?
A. You don’t have to do one – it is time consuming and the work is done by volunteers. BUT - those who have produced a plan tell us: It has brought the community closer together, it has provided much needed activities for young people. It has helped provide evidence of need for affordable housing. It has improved communications within the community. Parish Councils are more in touch with their communities. New people have joined local groups such as village hall committee and the Parish Council. It give the community a focus. It helps get things done! Plus there is help and support to guide you through the process.Q. How can we get people involved?
A. The key to getting people involved is to help them to understand exactly what a Parish Plan is and to persuade them that getting involved can be fun! Good publicity is key to this and helps to keep people informed and involved throughout the project, from start to finish. Posters, news sheets, articles in parish magazines and newspapers and village notice boards can all be regularly used to keep people up to date with what’s happening.Getting people to do things can be difficult but again there are things which you can do which really help. Early on in the project it’s useful to come up with a shopping list of jobs – delivering leaflets, hosting a meeting, visiting a group, taking photos etc – so that instead of asking people to help with ‘the plan’ (which sounds time consuming and scary!) you can ask them to help with a specific job. If people are asked directly they rarely say no and having done one thing people will often do more. With a little planning ahead you can often develop a small steering group which does the core work and a much larger group of helpers to do everything else.