Community Links South Lanarkshire featured as one of the 12 case studies in the Community Empowerment Action Plan, launched in March 2009. Further information on the organisation was provided in the web publication In Our Own Words: The Story Behind the Examples of Community Empowerment in Scotland.
Community Links was also a pilot project for VOiCE, the community engagement toolkit which enables the planning and delivery of community engagement activities, which was developed by the Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) for the Scottish Government.
Morag Pinion, Project Manager for Community Links South Lanarkshire, explains the work it has been doing in the year since the launch of the action plan, how VOiCE has impacted on community engagement and what the future holds for the organisation.
Who we are
Community Links (South Lanarkshire) is a not-for-profit, community-run organisation, working with local communities across South Lanarkshire, focusing on its more deprived areas. The organisation specialises in community engagement, consultation and empowerment.
Community Links offers a wide range of services. Bringing communities and service providers together is integral to its ethos. It offers a wide range of volunteering and training opportunities, produces a quarterly newspaper, 'Your Community Matters', and provides a free computer maintenance and advice service. It also supports a local environment task force and more importantly, recruits volunteers to assist in many aspects of their community consultations and ICT projects, who in turn benefit from personal development and many unique training opportunities.
What we do - Taking the Community Empowerment Agenda Forward in South Lanarkshire
The key targets for Community Links South Lanarkshire have included:
- Employability - implementing an extensive community consultation on behalf of and in partnership with both South Lanarkshire Council and JobCentre Plus, on local employability services. The aim of this consultation was to ascertain the level of local knowledge regarding local services and identify any opportunities for improvement. The consultation resulted in, among other things, JobCentre Plus employing a customer service front-line person to assist new claimants. In addition, it has secured Future Jobs Fund posts and is absolutely delighted with their enthusiasm, learning new skills and getting more involved in their communities.
- Health - after securing another annual Service Level Agreement for NHS Lanarkshire's Hamilton Public Partnership Forum (PPF) the organisation continues to plan, develop and monitor their engagement activity.
- Education - Community Links South Lanarkshire supported the local high school to set up a task force to drive forward a local clean-up campaign with campaign design tasks ongoing at present.
- Environment - community consultation continued around the Redlees Quarry site in Blantyre, to design and develop a new urban fringe park and woodland for the local community. Development has started on Phase 1 of construction and this is due to be completed this summer.
Further details on all the consultation and engagement activity of Community Links South Lanarkshire can be found on its website at www.commlinks.org.uk.
All completed consultations are also uploaded to South Lanarkshire Council's Online Consultation Register.
Using VOiCE - how this toolkit has improved our practice
Community Links has been using VOiCE now for almost two years and has introduced it to its everyday working practices. VOiCE is now used as an internal management system for every engagement project that they undertake and VOiCE not only helps it to plan and deliver appropriate, comprehensive community engagement but also ensures that it is meeting the national standards at every stage in the each project. By working with partners in using this piece of software Community Links agrees the best fit-for-purpose engagement level, identifies innovative ways to engage and encourages harder-to-reach individuals who may have been overlooked in the past.
Community Links, prior to VOiCE, delivered good community engagement projects using a range of alternative methods. However it has found that introducing this new process and software has allowed it to streamline and organise its engagement more methodically. It has also been enabled to support partners more readily by giving them a simplified process to follow. This has inevitably made engagement and consultation much more understandable to those who are just introducing their own engagement strategies.
Being champions of VOiCE, Community Links is currently implementing training courses for a number of its partner organisations over the community planning partnership. The uptake has been very encouraging so far.
What next?
Key priorities for the community over the coming year have been identified in partnership with our regeneration stakeholders as being health and wellbeing, community safety, tackling poverty and environment. In addition, as always, access to engagement, information and development opportunities for local individuals and residents is another key priority for Community Links.
Sustainability is the key challenge for Community Links in the coming year. It aims to address this challenge in a number of ways, including by:
- securing best value service level agreements with partners to deliver community engagement;
- encouraging partners to advertise and promote services in 'Your Community Matters';
- encouraging more individuals and communities to get involved in the decision making process;
- retaining and developing their much valued volunteers to help them achieve our vision and aims; and
- marketing its extensive experience of community engagement services to the private sector, so that they better understand their communities and how they can provide their services in an effective way.
The income generation will provide the organisation with the resources to sustain their levels of staff and service. Of course all of these will only be possible by encouraging the extensive use of VOiCE!
Contact details
If you would like to know more about Community Links South Lanarkshire and the extensive work it does, please contact:
Community Links (South Lanarkshire)
Unit 1A
Clydeview Shopping Centre
BLANTYRE
G72 0QD
Phone: 01698 827583
Email: administrator@communitylinkssl.org.uk
Website: www.commlinks.org.uk