Rural Services workshop

‘Working Smartly to deliver cost-effective rural services’
This workshop was facilitated by Chris Wade and he was joined by Tracy Turner, Rural Services Network
and Lucy Beadle, Little Red Bus Network.
Please scroll down for the presentations from the workshop and other resources.
Introduction
This workshop sought views on the scope of a joint research programme being launched between Action [...]

Get Healthy - nine-months for a fitter town!

Get Healthy. A faster, smarter, slimmer Healthcheck and future directions for Community Led Planning.

Content
The overall workshop objective was to launch and gain support for a stronger and more flexible CLP framework from Hamlet, via Town to Urban areas. Only time will tell if this succeeds but it got off to a good start.
Speakers
Chris [...]

What Makes an Effective Partnership?

Introduction
This workshop introduced the findings of a recent amt-i research project on Case Studies of Good Partnership. 25 Community Partnerships, from across the country and at various stages of maturity were interviewed to discover “what makes an effective partnership.” The findings have resulted in the production of a large scale qualitative research report and [...]

Delivering Affordable Housing Workshop

This workshop from Jenny Wood from Harrogate Borough Council and Andy Kerr from York City Council looked at how policy works in Harrogate and York to achieve over 40 per cent affordable housing in all new housing developments.
Have a look at this Affordable Housing Negotiation Case Study.
Different ways of delivering affordable housing are explored, including [...]

Car Parking Workshop

Car parking problems are common in most market towns, such as lack of parking spaces at peak times or the physical dominance of parked cars in sensitive locations, coupled with issues such as whether to decriminalise or not. Overcoming these problems can initially appear difficult.
Yorkshire Forward commissioned a piece of research into how parking can [...]

Prosperous Business, Prosperous Towns

Introduction
This workshop explored the issues of prosperity and sustainability and set out a framework for economic planning in market towns. The session was structures as follows:
• What do delegates think makes a town economically sustainable
• Market town types and economic functionality
• Economic assessment approaches, including the Welland Market Town Benchmarking
• Developing a plan: Marsden and Slaithwaite - [...]

Smarter Working – Developing your Partnership’s Skills

Introduction
This workshop launched two new training products developed by Action for Market Towns to help community partnerships increase their capacity to become sustainable.
Content
Community Leadership
Many market town partnership leaders have attempted to transfer their professional skills to the world of community development. People leading community partnerships are expected to manage a diverse group of people each [...]

Local Food workshop

The Local Food workshop featured a presentation about community-supported-agriculture from Kirstin Glendenning, The Soil Association.  The group heard about the project she is involved with in Swillington who have worked hard to turn a derelict plot of land belonging to a local farmer, into a thriving community allotment, growing vegetables and fruit for the community [...]

Local Retail workshop

Local Retail workshop featured Charlotte Foster from Plunkett Foundation (ViRSA) and John Longden from Pub is The Hub.
If you attended the Local Retail workshop, we do hope that you found the session engaging and useful.
Here you will find information from the session:
community-shop-handbook
community-shops-management-toolkit
how-to-create-a-community-shop

Local Energy workshop

Thank you to everyone who attended that Local Energy workshop on Day 2 in the ‘Nightclub’ at the Rendezvous’. (Please scroll down for interviews).
We heard from three interesting and inspiring examples of community energy projects:
Ross Weddle from CoRE
Adam Kennerley from Lightfoot Enterprises
Colin Mather from Esk Energy Group Ltd
Sam Adams spoke about how ruralnet|uk are working [...]