The Community Partnership Team made a commitment to the Newmains & District Community Council and local people to work together to develop a Community Action Plan.
This commitment resulted from a meeting arranged after several Local Development Programme (LDP) applications were submitted by the Community Council, igniting a conversation with them around improvements the community were looking for.
Community Partnership Team staff set up a meeting with a group of local residents, representatives of the Newmains & District Community Council and a local councillor where initial ideas and processes were discussed. Following the meeting at the Newmains Community Trust (NCT) Centre, the local people led a community walkabout around areas within Newmains to highlight issues, concerns and explain ideas for possible improvements in the area. This generated the need for a planned process to help the community achieve some of their aspirations.
As the main Anchor Organisation in Newmains, it made sense to involve the support of the Newmains Community Trust (NCT) who operate the NCT Centre providing a community space, café, meeting areas, events hall, and hosts the local library. The NCT contributes to, and has a vested interest in, community living in Newmains & District. The Wishaw Community Engagement subgroup then delegated this piece of work to a working group of some of the key subgroup members and key stakeholders, who developed a timeline of engagement, including meetings, activities and events. The groups involved also secured two sets of funding during this process to implement engagement and to progress the next steps.
We developed a planned schedule of events with a timeline to include all the stages of engagement, consultation, review, analysis, check-ins, and launch from June 2024 up to a completed action plan ready to launch by March 2025.
To date we have delivered 2 x Initial Information Sessions, one was a Coffee Morning and the other a drop-in evening session to catch anyone who was unable to make the morning session, also ran an Artwork project for children during the summer to involve their input and their artistic impressions of Newmains were displayed on a gallery at the main event. The Main Engagement event in August 2024 took place using Place Standards Tool. Place Standard Pop-up banners were designed and created by the Community Partnership Officer (CPO) along with graphics for the event. These match with the printed booklets for Place Standard Scotland.
We continued the consultation process via an on-line survey and also by offering booklet copies at six venues including the NCT Centre/Library, Newmains Health Centre, Newmains & St Brigid’s Community Hub, Abernethyn Family Learning Centre, and Morningside Primary School to give the opportunity for local residents to provide their views and to capture as many responses as possible, to maximise the responses returned and ensure meaningful information for inform the action plan. This closed on 2 September 2024 with 120 responses received via a mixture of online and completed booklets, ensuring a healthy amount of quality responses to work with to develop the action plan.
A full collation and review of the comments, data and ratings to select the key themes the action plan will focus on was completed by mid-October. The working group worked hard behind the scenes to complete this task. Through this exercise five key themes emerged out of 14. These were:
- Traffic & Parking
- Work & Local Economy
- Social Interaction
- Care & Maintenance
- Influence & Sense of Control
A check-in process with the community to check that our findings are reflective of their views, and we are getting it right, was delivered over a period of one week in October 2024.
This involved a mixture of easy online activity, on various localised platforms (as we know on-line works in Newmains), and an in-person opportunity to comment using flipcharts set up in the open area at the café at NCT. This process captured any views from those who missed the main engagement event or online opportunity, provided additional comments and helped us to gauge if the themes arising from the consultation are correct and in line with the community’s opinions.
Between November 2024 and February 2024 the working group are tasked with the write-up of the draft action plan, with a view to finalising the document to go to graphics for publishing the final action plan.
One final check-in consultation was rolled out in mid-February to with all key stakeholders to ensure the community are happy with their draft community action plan before it is finalised, published and printed. This final check-in was delivered through the check-in link previously utilised and circulated to the full contact list for Newmains which includes community organisations, groups, agencies, residents and businesses. This exercise ensured awareness, buy-in and encouragement of involvement in the implementation of the community action plan.
