News & Events

Report on regional Community Engagement conference, Taunton

Creating Excellence, the South-West's Regeneration agency, held a conference entitled 'Getting Places Together: Local Engagement in Changing Times' on Thursday 25th March.

The presentations by Dominic Murphy, Creating Excellence's Director, Julian Dobson, Editorial Director of New Start magazine, and Neil McInroy, Chief Exec of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) were thought-provoking and are well worth a read. You can download them from the CE website here.

The workshops I attended on the Comprehensive Area Assessment/Total Place and on Community Leadership were not.

The central theme was 'Can Localism Deliver?'. Which is something all SMTF members will have pondered at some point! However we are trying to do our bit and deliver solutions to our local problems.

During a plenary session, and in the workshops, the following points were made;

- that until Govt makes Community Engagement a Statutory Obligation of Local Authorities, it all too often is dropped or done very poorly (i.e. 'the tickbox attitude')

- Too many elected representatives (at Town and District level) are ambivalent towards, or actually against, participatory democracy.  We see this in the way some Town Councils operate their meetings, and some Districts ignore community groups that can speak for a wide constituency.

 

 

Created on April 8th 2010

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