Involving Communities in Planning Services David Allen BURA award winner for excellence in community regeneration, 2003 Highly commended in the Scottish Urban Regeneration Awards ‘People’ section, 2004 First in the Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley awards in the Business in the Community section, 2005 Taylor Award winner in Falkirk for quality services, upskilling the workforce March 2009 This was developed as part of the Scottish Government’s Better Community Engagement Programme

Programme Today  A bit of theory – Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation: how it can help us  Current practice and how it relates to Arnstein’s Ladder  The skills you might need to encourage and develop community involvement in decisions  A hypothetical example – Anytown and planning effective involvement In all of this your own past and current experience of involving communities in planning services will be important.

Learning Outcomes Participants will;  understand the different levels of participation and their application.  be more aware of the benefits of involving communities in planning services.  have identified the range of current practice.  understand better the skills and competences required to involve local communities in planning services.  be more aware of the process of planning effective engagement of local communities in service delivery and community regeneration.

Arnstein’s Ladder A Ladder of Citizen Participation Sherry R Arnstein

Competences  Manage and promote participative policy making.  Enable open and honest expression of views.  Work with communities and agencies to identify needs, opportunities, rights and responsibilities.  Enable purposes to be clearly identified, agreed and stated.  Explain the planning process and timescale, providing clear information and appropriate publicity.  Explain policies that are relevant to and will have an impact on the planning process.  Understand and work with community politics and networks.  Enable constraints, challenges and opportunities to be identified and addressed.

Competences  Assess how local people, service users and agencies understand the planning process and competing agendas.  Break down barriers to community participation and enable community representatives to play active roles in strategic planning, decision making and action, as appropriate.  Work with communities and agencies to select options, clarify roles and responsibilities, and make plans for action.  Use planning techniques (for example, action planning and ‘planning for real’).  Enable and contribute to a review of needs, opportunities, rights and responsibilities within a community.  Recognise and negotiate issues of confidentiality.  Ensure effective feedback to communities and agencies about decisions and actions.

Anytown One hour exercise planning a programme to involve local communities in the regeneration of the area.

Anytown What are the needs we want to address? What evidence do we have of this need? Does this need fit into any national/ regional/ local identified policy and practice priorities? As a worker/agency, what is our motivation for addressing the identified need? What is the community's motivation for addressing the identified need? Who are the key partners?

Anytown Who might want to resist any attempt to address this need (i.e. who are the targets for change?) and what form might the resistance take? What is the opportunity to address this resistance effectively? What resources (inputs) do we as the stakeholders have available that we can draw on to achieve these outcomes? Physical, financial, knowledge, skills

Anytown What methods (processes) will we use and what specific actions will we take to achieve what we want? Who will take these actions and when?