Community Action Plan

1

W H E R E T O S T A R T ?

Donside Community Council (DCC)

2  I discussed with the Community Council if they wanted an Action Plan and if so, how we should go about it.

 They decided to form a sub Committee of four and invite a member from the Local Community Learning and Development Group, the Alford and Area Community Development Group and the Marr Area Partnership to join this sub Committee.

 At our first sub meeting we organised places and times to meet and discussed the way forward.

 The DCC was kept informed of our progress.

Next Stage - Planning a Public Meeting

3      First we obtained a list of all the groups/organisations in the area.

Booked a public meeting place and arranged tea/coffee etc for the general public.

We identified who would pay for this and other incidentals.

Sent invitations to all groups/organisations, include developers and schools, to attend with a stand. This was to show the public what they were doing or proposing to do in the future that might affect our area.

Planned how we were going to collect information and who would be there to set up and run it.

Community Engagement

4      We gave our event a name that would be easily identified and associated to our area e.g. “Oor Alford Hae Yer Say”.

Asked Schools and Youth Organisations to get involved.

Advertised our event as widely as possible using posters in shop windows, press releases, local news letters, schools, word of mouth and notice boards etc. and invited the press to attend.

We involved our local Aberdeenshire Councillors, MSP’s and MP’s and invite them to attend.

Emphasised the importance of public attendance “it’s their future”.

On The Day – We

5   Set up and organised where the stand holders would go, avoiding possible clashes.

Met and greeted everyone, making sure they registered and understood what they had to do and how to do it. Plenty of post-it’s, pens available.

  Put headed blank sheets of A3 paper on the walls for the public to place their post-it’s along with their comments under the relevant headings. Collected further information from stand holders.

 Made sure someone was responsible for collating all the information gathered.

Oor Alford Event

6

Arranging a Follow up Event

7    We organised a cheese and wine evening and sent invitations out to all groups/organisations who attended “Oor Alford” and those that did not, to send a representative along.

The purpose was to get a collective view from these groups what their priorities were and to add these views to our “Oor Alford” event results.

The second reason behind this was to open communication between groups/organisations with the Donside Community Council and themselves.

Our Results and way forward

8     After collecting and collating all the results, priorities were chosen as the most important to our community.

A document was produced and following a number of meetings, it was eventually agreed as to how it should look. A Community profile being appended to this.

This document will now be presented to our Local Marr Community Planning Group who will incorporate what they can.

The Donside Community Council along with identified project leaders will now attempt to deliver these priorities where possible.