Earlier this year the Improvement Service worked in partnership with Place at the Table and Imagine If.Space to offer free training sessions for community councils on Local Place Plans.
There were six sessions which covered the basics of a local place plan, what types of organisations can submit them, how to project manage a plan, community engagement and data gathering. The final session in the series provided an introduction to National Planning Framework 4.
The sessions were well attended with over 100 people regularly online each week eager to learn more about Local Place Plans with the training sessions helping people to decide whether a local place plan is the way to go for their organisation or perhaps whether a community action plan would be more appropriate.
Recordings of all six sessions along with the presentation slides for each session are available to view on the Community Councils Scotland website. Community councils who attended (and those who couldn’t make it), other community organisations and anyone who has an interest in Local Place Plans will find the training sessions of interest.
Attendees were keen to continue the conversations after the training ended and a space was created online via the Scottish Community Councillors development network on the Knowledge Hub.
Trainers, Paul Ede and Chiara Fingland were delighted to deliver the sessions and Paul said:
‘We have all inherited places that local people have helped shape and make better for us. We can’t pay that back, but we can pay it forward with our time and passion. As community leaders ourselves, who also work professionally to deliver Local Place Plans, Chiara and I are only too aware of the significant labour of love volunteer-led production of these plans can be. Frustrated with the lack of support available for communities, as Imagine If and Place at the Table we decided to just get our insights “into the wild” for the benefit of groups across Scotland. We were very grateful to Brian and the Community Council Network to make that space available for us to share.
The kind gratitude for these sessions from Community Councils came across immediately in the chat at the end of the online sessions. But it also led us to be able to further support communities across Scotland, both paid and unpaid. Inchinnan Development Trust, who were initially sceptical about the value of Local Place Plans, attended our sessions and changed their minds, realising that a LPP could be a meaningful tool in a number of ways for them in their context. From thinking about housing development to protecting open space. And Lochwinnoch Community Development Trust valued the simple framing and explanation we were able to give, particularly the value of laying out their aims around flood risk mitigation, town centre regeneration and protecting the environment. Both have since used funds from Renfrewshire Council to employ us to deliver support for their own processes (which is ongoing), including mentoring, engagement delivery, report writing and graphic design. And we were able to support Torry Community Council when they followed up with questions about how best to run a place-based online survey, allowing us to coach them in the use of Padlet for this work.
These are just a few of the examples of how the training has impacted attendees. And we trust open access to the material, kindly hosted by the Improvement Service, will continue to be of benefit over the coming period.’