Community Leaders Session 12/9/24

Ruth Pineda
4 min readSep 27, 2024

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It’s been a fortnight since we gathered at Worthing Town Hall to hear about the change the councils are undergoing and to hear grassroots community leaders’ thoughts on where we go next.

And, as promised I am blogging to share the outputs of the session including a record of the group discussion and drawings.

I found reviewing the work we did together genuinely inspiring — in our conversation there was much hope, possibility and constructive challenge and I’m feeling grateful for the energy everyone brought to the conversation.

Inclusion, collaboration and connection

The desire for greater inclusion, collaboration and connection was a strong theme across group conversations — and surfaced lots of great ideas about how to bring people together (“community banquet” / “online forum” / “is it an event?”), as well as the need for better representation (“everyone in the room is white”).

“Hold us to account with kindness”

It’s also been good to revisit Catherine Howe’s ‘check out’ at the end of the session which included invitations to community leaders to “hold us [the councils] to account with kindness”, and to “get to these spaces together” [the inclusive, diverse, connected spaces].

And, in the spirit of this last point, for those of you who want to get together more and run with any of the ideas that came out of this session, we are curious to learn what role the councils can take in enabling this to happen i.e.

  1. To get out of the way and let you get on with it?
  2. Offer support with gathering people (convening)?
  3. Offer support with co-hosting / co-facilitating?

Feedback welcome so please do comment on the blog if you have thoughts.

What is the council now running with that you can get involved in?

On the theme of inclusion — it’s a good opportunity to signal that next month we will be launching a survey aimed at learning more about inclusion and resilience in our local community, voluntary and social enterprise sector.

Please look out for the invitation to participate, we’d love to hear your stories and will be super grateful if you can circulate the survey more widely in your networks.

In particular, we are keen to hear from those groups / communities that we are not currently connected to so your support in connecting us further will be gratefully appreciated :)

An update on Neighbourhoods and the Adur Local Plan.

Our Neighbourhoods team are currently pulling together information about the new service and how to contact them, and this will be communicated shortly.

Our Planning policy team is currently planning engagement work for later this Autumn. We will keep you informed about the opportunities for residents and communities to get involved.

And finally, when and how do we next meet?

We are giving thought to the frequency and form of future community leaders sessions — some things we’re wondering about include:

  • “How do we move from a council-led convening / conversation into something more co-owned?”
  • “How frequently do we want to meet?”
  • “Who do we gather next?”

So again, if you have thoughts / suggestions on the above, please do get in touch.

Best wishes for the weekend — fingers crossed for some sunshine :)

Warmest wishes,

Ruth

(Participation Lead, Adur & Worthing Councils)

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