 I welcome everybody. I'm Bill Handley. I'm district councillor for the villages of Over and Willingham, and I'm the lead cabinet member for community resilience health and well-being at South Cams district council. The council's been supporting communities in the district during the coronavirus pandemic and we had a fantastic community response and we wish to continue to do so as we all learn to live with COVID and continue the recovery from the effects of the last couple of years. Community-led plans are part of that. They're intended to stimulate discussion in communities and to encourage people to say how they'd like to see their community change and to produce an action plan based on the evidence that comes from the conversations they have with their communities. This action plan will then form a guide, really, to allow communities to put these changes into practice. Every community-led plan is going to be different. Some are going to be, no doubt, wide-ranging and quite ambitious while others will probably be light touch. Perhaps come into the conclusion quite quickly that their community's already pretty well served and probably needs little more than a few tweaks. The important thing to notice is that this is really up to you and what the council does is to just provide the support, including some financial support to actors, sort of a stimulus and to help get projects off the ground, but ultimately it's up to you. One thing the community-led plan or community-led plans are not is a neighbourhood plan. In my experience there is still some confusion over what the two projects or the two types of projects offer. We're pleased to welcome Alison Torkington here this evening who's a senior planning policy officer at South Cams who will be pointing out the differences to us all. We also welcome Liz Hill who is chair of High Hub, the community website for the villages of Histon and Impington. And finally this evening we have, this is part of a climate and environment fortnight and Linda Whitebread of two G3S green groups in the Shelford, Stapleford and Sourston who's going to be talking about how you might set up your own green group. But if I can just finish my short intro with a couple of housekeeping points, the session is being recorded and will be available to view on our website. So if you'd rather not be seen, please turn off your camera. Also would you please remain on mute while presenters are speaking and when it comes to questions either put them in the chat and then we'll deal with them at a suitable time or better still leave them until the dedicated Q&A session that we have at the end of the evening. OK, but now I'm going to pass over to Emma Dyer who's development officer in the community's team at South Cams District Council and Emma's going to facilitate the rest of the evening. Hello Emma over to you. Thank you Bill. As Bill said I'm Emma Dyer and I work in the communications and communities team at the council and I help Parish's development community action. So hopefully can you see the agenda OK is the first thing just want to make sure you can see that OK. Basically this shows tonight's guest speakers and then also joined by my colleague Catherine Hawkes who will be assisting in the Q&A session at the end. So basically community-led plans are a good way to achieve community action as they allow engagement with the whole community to establish what is important to them. So as Bill says one of the questions we often get asked is what is a community-led plan and how does it differ to a neighbourhood plan or is it the same thing. So this is something we're keen to bring to today's workshop to help people understand the key differences. And I'm delighted to be joined by Alison Torkington from the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Department and she will cover this next. And then after Alison I'll just go through the process involved with a community-led plan and then how we can support you. Thank you and over to you Alison. Yes I'm Alison I work in the planning policy team at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service and I've been the lead on neighbourhood plans for a number of years now. The neighbourhood plans are a community-led initiative very similar in that respect to community-led plans which give local communities the power to prepare a planning document for the part of the statutory development plan for the district and therefore can be used in deciding and determining planning applications for that local area. That's a really key thing that is different from the community-led plan. It has a statutory role when it's gone through all its processes. The policies contained within a neighbourhood plan, when it's eventually adopted, have equal weight in determining planning applications to those that are contained in our South Cambridge local plan. So it has a lot of importance in that respect. It can have policies like allocating housing sites, protecting green spaces, identifying key important views, it can influence the design of new development so that it's in keeping with the village character. So it has a number of specific roles that it can carry out. It has that increased weight and importance in planning terms which is something the community-led project. Although it might actually look at some of those issues then there will be a statutory role for the neighbourhood plan. In fact, there are national guidance that has been prepared by central government that sets out how you can prepare a neighbourhood plan. So it has a very formal process in a way that maybe the community-led plan can be a bit more relaxed and informal and being put forward as the community might want. A neighbourhood plan must be led by a parish council, but with the support of the local planning authority. South Cambridge District Council, and I suppose now the greater shared, Cambridge-shared planning service to which I now belong, that takes in the Cambridge city as well. We have a statutory duty to assist local communities preparing neighbourhood plans so we would have to help. On that line, we have a support offer that we set out, the specific help that we will give to parish councils preparing neighbourhood plans. Any policies that you would contain in your neighbourhood plan have to be backed up with really firm evidence. You can't just pluck an idea out of the air. It has to have evidence behind it. There is a set procedure that you have to go through. You get together your policies as to what issues you want to contain in your neighbourhood plan. There are two formal public consultations that have to be carried out. There will be an examination where we as the local planning authority employer, an examiner to carry out that examination. Once you've got successfully through examination, there is a referendum. In fact, there's just been one in Water Beach, which the people of Water Beach voted in favour that that neighbourhood plan should go forward and be used in determining planning applications in that area. It's been very much something that central government have been promoting. On that line, they have an organisation called Locality who help facilitate giving grants to any parish council or local community that is preparing a neighbourhood plan. You can get up to £10,000 in funding to assist you to do a neighbourhood plan. If you're allocating housing site or meeting certain other criteria, you can get another £8,000. So that's potentially £18,000 to help you prepare your neighbourhood plan. There's also, I mentioned locality, they have a number of technical packages that can help you prepare your neighbourhood plan. I would say that preparing a neighbourhood plan can be quite a complicated thing. It's having that, which is why we are there as the local planning authority to help. Because it might have writing a policy that is not going to be torn apart by developers when they want a particular thing within your parish can be quite a difficult thing to achieve. So it is something that there is, as I say, a set process that you have to go through in order to prepare your neighbourhood plan. So that, I hope, gives a quick run-through of what a neighbourhood plan is. And I hope by the end of the evening when others have done their talks about community-led plans, you'll see that what a community-led plan is slightly different to that of a neighbourhood plan. I don't know whether there's anything else you want from the emmer, or does that give a good introduction? That's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Alison. I'll just get my presentation up, and Catherine will be putting hers up at the same time while my presentation from that she's sharing for me. Just bear with me two seconds. So just before I start, we seem to have a technical issue where the chat function isn't actually, it seems to be disabled and we can't get it back. So if you've got any questions, if it's okay, you could you ask them at the end and raise your hand at the end of the presentations in the Q&A sessions. That'd be fantastic. So I would like to break down the process of a community-led plan. There are three core principles on the next slide, Catherine, that define a community-led plan. So firstly, to make the most of your plan, your community must take the lead on creating and achieving the plan. So people in your community will ultimately own the plan and take responsibility for making it to work. Secondly, involving different people, groups and organisations will allow you to produce a high quality plan that has the support of everyone locally. Actions will then have a sound understanding of local needs and expectations. And the third point, it offers a structured process that can be used by your community to address a range of different issues. The plan could aim to achieve anything within reason, from organising regular litter picks, buying a fridge for a community cafe, through setting up an environmental group. Onto the next slide, this diagram, I hope you can see it, it's a little bit squished. This is the process to producing a community-led plan. And this was first put together by ACA, which is known as Action for Communities in Rural England. And I'll go through each of these steps in turn. So the first one on the next slide is launch. So when you launch your plan, we would advise the following steps. You would get in touch with your nearest parish or town council who can offer support. You would attract interest from the wider community. You would make contact with a range of volunteers who might be able to help out. And then you would launch the plan. So I'd say the best way is through a public event where people can learn more and ask questions. You then want to form your steering group who should be representative of your community. And these are the people who are essential for making sure that the plan keeps going. And it's a good idea at this stage to get a written constitution in place for your steering group to basically tell people what it does, reduce the risk of misunderstandings and make it easier to apply for funding. And next, you would establish a working group or groups, as not everybody needs to be on the steering group. So you might decide that as the plan progresses, you'll need separate working groups to work on different projects. And working groups don't need to have a written constitution, it's useful to have what's known as a terms of reference document, which basically tells people what the group does and how they will do it. And then after this, it's important to make sure you have enough funding, volunteers, information and support to continue the plan. And the last step in this stage is producing a project plan, which sets out the work that needs to be done over the coming months to get the plan written up. It also helps you to think through what needs to be done when and by whom. The next slide is all about evidence. So understanding your community is an essential part in producing a plan. We would advise obtaining existing facts and information about your local area. You'll then consult with your community as they will know the local area best. It's important to remember to consider consultation methods that are appropriate for the people you want to involve. Think about what makes your local community a place where people want to live, prosper and be happy both now and in the future. And a questionnaire is always a good way to do this, although there are other methods such as interviews, focus groups and webinars. Now, the following slide provides some elements you may wish to include in your consultation process, remembering that a sustainable community needs to have the right balance of economic, social and environmental considerations. Onto the next slide. This is to make sense of all the information that you've already gathered. So a good starting point is to categorise your data according to the elements listed on the previous slide. You'll then look for common themes or issues. Then you would test your findings with the rest of your community and prioritise the most important actions and a good way to put the data you've collected into a short report is to present this to your community and ask for feedback. It's important to ask probably three questions that are probably the most important ones, which are, are people in general agreements? Is anything missing and what do they think are the most important issues? Once you've done this, you'd produce a draft plan which needs to tell anyone reading it what makes your community unique, how people value it and how it can be improved in the future. This should include an action plan which tells readers how specific issues will be addressed by whom and with what resources and by when. Onto this slide, the next slide, the delivery stage. By this stage you should be confident that your draft plan is an accurate and fair reflection of everyone's needs and expectations. But you should give members of your community one last chance to comment on it. And then once everybody's happy, you'll produce a final plan. You'll then launch the plan in a way that gains maximum recognition and support. For example, maybe you'd want to do this at the weekends or during holidays or maybe to coincide with a sort of key community event. And then you'll be able to put the plan into action, which is the last bit. You have to bear in mind that it could take several years to do this and you'll continually need to check progress and keep your community informed. And finally, you'd also want to review your community plan every few years to make sure that it's up to date and that it still meets the needs and aspirations of your community. So that's quite a lot, but don't worry too much because that's all on our webpages and we can provide links later on. So don't worry too much about all the sort of detail within that. And the support that we can offer is again on that same web page and again we can email that out after the session. So just some of the key things that we can help with. We can provide important contacts and details of other organisations or groups. We can help in bringing community groups together within your village. We have guidance sheets and templates to help. For example, we've got an extensive bank of questions to help with questionnaires. That's one of the sort of sticking points a lot of communities come across. It's like, how do we do the questionnaires? So don't worry too much about that. We can support you with that. We can help launch your plan at public events. We can give advice on setting up an appropriate leadership structure. We can provide guidance on different consultation techniques. We can put you in contact with council officers like Alison and also community groups and other professionals who may be able to help with specific actions. We've got a list of community action case studies. So if you were sort of wondering what kind of things might be, you know, something you could sort of perhaps copy or replicate, you could have a look at those. We can also, as Bill said earlier, we can support you in accessing grant funding, including up to £2,000 from our community chest grant funds. And at the moment we've got £50,000, which is ring fence specifically for community-led plans. So you can apply, I think, with that up until October 2023. So there's a couple of years there. So it's worth, if you're thinking about doing a community-led plan, tapping into that and applying. We can also help in finding evidence of your plan. We can also comment on your consultation process, your draft questionnaire and your draft plan. And then if you wanted, we could put your finished plan on our website. And then just a couple of extra things we could do. We could also visit your group to answer questions and lead. And we could also lead on workshops. We can help with revisiting and refreshing old plans. And we can help with checking its progress as well. So that's quite a lot of bits there or anything else that you can think of. You know, we can always support you with. And then on to the next slide, it's just my contact details. So I know I've been going on about community-led plans, but we can also offer advice on single projects. So if you're not doing a community-led plan, any sort of project which is helping your community and you need a little bit of help and guidance we can help you with. And also each of our workshops will also provide some inspirational case studies as well to sort of give you some sort of idea what's going on in the district. And the first of tonight's case studies comes to you from Liz Hill from High Hub, who's going to talk about the community website. So thank you, Liz, over to you. We're going to help you by our mute, isn't it? So hello everyone. And thank you for that, Emma. It was really interesting listening because quite a lot of what High Hub is doing actually links into what we're trying to do with the community-led plans. And I'll just give you a little bit of background about what High Hub is and how it got started. So about 2018, a group in the village called High Sustainability screened a film at the local community centre called Dumann, which was all about how to become more sustainable as a community. And it looked at communities around the world and how they were doing that. We followed that up with a meeting at which the community got together and decided what were the barriers to us doing something similar in Histoman in Pinto. And it was decided that one of the biggest barriers of all was actually communicating with the community so that they knew what was going on and what the issues were and what people were deciding on. So listening to you talk about community-led plans and actually liaising and getting community feedback is an area where we felt that in our village we weren't strong enough. There were a few very loud voices, but not enough. So we got together and formed effectively an interest group who decided, some of us decided to move forward and create a website. Next slide, please. The website is an independent community website for our village, which combines with a weekly email, news and information roundup which goes out to members of the community who subscribe. We're now up to about, I think it's over 1,300 subscribers and we have very good web traffic. So if you could just next slide, please. The reason we set up Highhub was because at that meeting where we all got together and decided we needed better communication was that the ultimate goal was to help residents reduce their carbon footprints. It was all about sustainability by living a more local life because one of the ways in which we can become more sustainable is by not travelling outside our villages so much by making use of all the facilities and services that are local. We felt that that was one of the things that we wanted to support the village to do. And so there's a whole list of aims there that we had. So connecting the less connected. So some people in the village are very connected. They're on the parish council, they're leading community groups and so forth. But a lot of people aren't. That includes people who go out to work all day, only get home in the evenings and aren't that connected to what's going on. We wanted to have some sort of news and information service that would make sure that they were connected. We wanted to boost involvement in village activities and initiatives. So if you know Mr Olympian, we're very, very blessed with a huge range of community groups and sports groups and clubs and other types of activities. And getting people involved with what already exists seemed like a really good goal to make people's lives in the village more fulfilling. So equally providing more timely information about local opportunities. So if there's an event happening next week or there's a deadline, for example, for a consultation coming up to make sure that people have got that date in the diary. Another form of communication in the village is a quarterly newspaper, which is produced by the parish council. But quarterly isn't much good for things that are happening within the next two weeks unless it happens to coincide with publication dates. So we wanted to make sure that the information got out there when people needed it. We also wanted deeper information and more reliable local news. So I don't know whether other villages are the same, but the rumor mill can go pretty wild when something happens and people aren't quite sure what's happening and social media pick it up. So we wanted to make absolutely certain that people knew the truth about what was going on and to produce some responsible journalism that would tell people facts rather than perpetuate a rumor mill. So a lot of the work that we do is actually sharing news stories. And a lot of the news stories actually come out of the council. So the parish council, South Cams and the counter council, their initiatives can carry any consultations that they have. We want to make sure that people really know what's going on and how they can respond to them and make their feelings known. Locally, we're very lucky, again, in Houston and in Kingston to have lots of local employers and we can attract local labor. If we can attract local labor to local employers, that means that people don't use, have to use their own cars to go into Cambridge or to go in other directions. So every week we publish a list of all the jobs that are going on in Houston and in Kingston. We do a big tour of what's happening and we have a big jobs list and that encourages people to stay local for their employment. And equally, we've recently done a very successful shop local campaign which we ran in October to encourage people to buy locally as well as to live local and to be employed locally. So those were our goals. That's where we were coming from. Next slide, please. I'll show you what we've done with this. So you can see that's a page, that's our news page. You can see along the top there, those are the tabs that we've got. Home news features, what's on, a directory, property jobs. And there's just an example of a news page. This is a couple of weeks old now. It's updated every week. There's probably five or six news stories going on in terms of news every week. There's main news and then there's news in group. So things like what's happening with council tax, warning people that council tax is going to be changing and by how much and making sure that we've got the facts right there. New people coming to the village, a new state agent, etc. So that's just an example, some of the news stories. In order to generate the news stories, we have a team of six volunteer journalists and those volunteer journalists come up with news stories. They write up news and features and they go up on the web and we've trained everybody, first of all, with journals and skills, but also with web skills to enable them to upload the content. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is some features. So news is really about what's happening. It is, as it says on the team, new and news and what's going on, but also we do features. And so the first feature there is very much to do with the parish council, which has got elections coming up, explaining to people what the role of the parish council is and why they need people to step forward. So it's not news as such, but it's an explanatory piece. There we are. We've got Histon Football Club, their revival beginning, Valentine's Day special, something about Winter Walks and about the Spire Hospital. Just an eclectic bunch of features, just like you would find in any newspaper or magazine, a whole range of things. And what we aim to do is to make sure that in every single issue, so we publish these things on an email every Thursday, in every issue, there's something different so that people are interested in football might not be terribly interested in the Winter Walk at Histon Manor. We're trying to get a diverse content in there to make sure that everyone in the village has got something that they're interested in. Next slide, please. Critical to what we do is the Watson page and the Watson section. And the Watson, this is just an example of that, but we also do Watson by date. There's a calendar in there and there's a listing of Watson. It enables everyone who's doing anything in the village to promote themselves on there, provided they are in the village and working for the village and promote all of that free of charge. If people from other villages want to add to our page, then they can pay a small fee to go on there as well. But the idea is that we try and keep people in the village and make sure that they're well connected with everything that's going on. Next slide, please. And the directory is really, it's a listing of what's available in the village and who's available in the village. So these are all the business services, domestic services, Watson societies, et cetera, that are all operating in the village. And there's a search function. So if, for example, you're looking for a plumber, you can type in plumber and the search function will find you some plumbers. It's as simple as that, just to make sure that people's details are in there and available. So it's an information service as well as a new service. Next slide, please. Thank you. Property, there we go. I think I mentioned property. Property, or maybe I didn't mention property. Property for sale and less is among our more popular entries every week. Lots of people want to know, even if they're not actually looking for another property, everybody likes to have a little nose and see what's going on in the village. But equally as important are all of the planning applications that are going in that will affect residents in the village. So what we do is each week, we control through the planning applications that have gone through and do very short, just summaries of what's happening there. And we link people then to the planning applications. So that anybody interested, anyone who's in these roads can take a look and see what's likely to happen close to them and give them the opportunity to have their say. Next slide, please. Finally, jobs. I did mention jobs earlier, but not just jobs. So there's paid jobs on the left-hand side, but we've also got volunteer jobs. So for example, we've got the Histon Beer Festival needs volunteers. We start promoting that early for the Abbey Fields website, et cetera. And I think this is a really critical part of it, because in order to create community, you need your volunteers. But how do you find those volunteers unless they know what's out there and what they could volunteer for? So we feel that this is actually something that really does help the community to get together and to find others in the community with similar interests, as well as find people jobs locally and people that are looking locally. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. So who benefits from all of this, all of this work that we're doing? So different groups benefit. So residents benefit from knowing what's on and who's doing what. So they're very important. The community itself is the most important focus of what we're doing there. It's absolutely critical that people feel that they're connected to the village, to their neighbours, to others in the community. But also businesses can benefit. They can benefit by attracting staff. They can benefit by promoting themselves to people locally. The community groups, we can write stories about them when they're holding open days. We can encourage people to go along and join them. All sorts of things that we can do by communicating about those community groups. I mentioned earlier the parish district and council and other public bodies. We share their information. So not just those but also the police, the fire service, planning authorities, all of the different public bodies that want people to know what's going on in their communities. We write news stories about them and cover what's going on. Finally, who benefits volunteers? I'll go back to this again because in my experience of a long lifetime of being a perpetual volunteer, the volunteers get as much out of volunteering as the people who are valuing and benefiting from their services. Personally, I think that connecting people by encouraging them to become volunteers is equally an important service as it is for the residents who enjoy those services. We feel that all of those groups benefit in the next life. It's two years since launch. We actually launched in 1st of February 2020 which was not great if you remember what happened six weeks later which was that we all went into complete lockdown so not ideal timing but we managed to keep going through all of that and it's now two years since launch. As I said, we've got over 1,300 sign-ups to our weekly emails which literally scoop material off the sites and at the press of a button deliver these emails. We don't even have to press the button that's all automated now so long as the material is on the site it will go into the email and it's automatically distributed. Popular news stories which are often about what's happening on the high street or really big planning issues such as there was a big planning issue about the new supported housing development coming in a place that people weren't happy with. There's Cambridge Science Park north suggesting that it sets up on Impington land etc. They get a huge number of reads and over a thousand unique visits to popular news stories. You can see from the chart there, from the diagram there the days where the peaks are are the days that the emails go out and we send out an email people click through from the email and they read the stories and you can see that we can get over 1,200 page views on the days where we send those emails out and we're only talking about a village with about 4,000 households so that's pretty good going in terms of penetration. High Hub is entirely run by team of volunteers and board members so we're a very committed bunch we have now appointed a part-time administrator we've become members of the independent community news network which is a national organisation which is effectively the kite mark to say that what we're doing is high quality journalism and as I said earlier we've done a successful shop local campaign. Next slide please. So what next? So thank you very much south council district council we've just heard that you have given us some community chess money to enable us to stream the content of High Hub on a digital notice board in the window of the library which is on our high street so we're really hoping that that will enable us not just to serve people to get our emails and read our websites but for anyone who's digitally unconnected they can actually see that notice board and it's a two-way notice board facing into the library and into the street with just one bit of funding short which we're really hoping to get in the next few weeks so that's going to be a really exciting development for more use of the content that we're actually producing at the moment and finally multi village collaboration one of the things that we're very keen to do we feel that we've got a model that works and after two years we're fairly confident with that model works but we'd like to share it with other villages because we've gained an awful lot of expertise over the years in the start-up phase by the way that was a more than 18 month process getting the thing going and off the ground and what we'd like to do is to help other villages who would like to have this same sort of digital connection to get off the ground as well that would help us all find really sustainable business model for connecting our communities using communications so final slide please so anyone who's watching anyone who's involved in this who's interested in just literally having a chat about how it might work in your village please email me and we're really keen to start sharing and to start thinking about how this model could go further thank you, Steve, I'm done Thank you Liz, that was amazing I was really impressive actually I mean it would be fantastic if people could replicate that in other villages in the district that would be really good so thank you for leading on to our next speaker is Linda Whitebread from 2G3S over to you Linda Thank you very much everybody Can I have That's it right, that's me then Linda Whitebread from 2G3S which stands for Green Groups in the Shelford, Stapleford and Sauston Can I have the next slide please This is my only slide everybody and I am going to be talking to this but we have got a pdf of what I'm saying so if you're interested you can get the pdf after this talk so about 2G3S it's a non party political green group we set it up in 2015 to promote green activity in our local villages which is the Shelford Greater Little Shelford, Stapleford and Sauston and to share green ideas so green activities green information and we started off on the setting up we started off with just a few people meeting in a pub at the end of 2015 and deciding the sort of thing we wanted to do and then basically through word of mouth and telling people and putting ads in the local village magazines and starting off with a few events that's how we got going we don't have a formal membership but we've got people who are more interested than others and come to more meetings than others and we have a sort of informal working group really we do have a convener and a treasurer and then we've got other people who chair or minute meetings do publicity and lead on various topics we meet we started off meeting every six weeks or so with planning meetings but that's increased a little bit we now try and have a meeting every month and we alternate planning meetings with speakers or conversation evenings or other events we have a quarterly newsletter as well and I shall come on to that in a moment under the educational role so how we operate I just wanted to say a little bit about COVID because when COVID came on the scene we couldn't meet as we had been doing so we started meeting online zooming and so forth and it was quite interesting that we got a different range of people when we did that and we wondered whether it was because people were perhaps a bit daunted by coming in person or found it inconvenient or what have you so we've tried to continue with the zooming and we now try and do hybrid meetings so that you can come along in person if you like or you can link in via zoom and that's taken a little bit of working out how to do it but it seems to be working quite well at the moment the other thing I would say about how we operate is that you do find that different types of people or different groups of people come to different things so there's a lot of aspects to sustainability and environmentalism and green activities and it's quite interesting that different people come to different things and they have different perspectives and this can enrich the group and we learn from each other and it's interesting to see how the different aspects of the general area of sustainability and so forth how each area of interest works with the others and creates a rounded vision of a green and sustainable society coming on then to the educational role we've set out to share information and share green ideas so our main means of doing this are a website and the links and all that are on the PDF that you can get at the end we also have a quarterly newsletter and that has now got about 240 subscribers and again I've given you a link on the handout which you can link and see what the newsletters are like but they tend to be about four to six pages long and they detail upcoming events and report on past events both our own and other relevant events locally we also have a Facebook page and then the events that further the educational aims are we have quite a few talks and conversation evenings where it's a less formal talk and then we've had films we've had quite a few films and then a lot of the activises we do are raising awareness of environmental issues so for example we do nature walks and we've had green afternoons and apple days and so forth practical there aren't that many practical things which don't also have an educational role but we have done litter picking for example there was the great big green week last autumn and we did a litter pick for that with the help of Stapleford parish councillors and probably the most impactful things we do are repair cafes which probably people have heard of where you have volunteer repairers and people come along with an item which needs repairing and you match the two and they're very successful and people go away either with a repaired item or with a good idea of where they could go to get it repaired or with the knowledge unfortunately that it can't be repaired but at least it gives them permission then to get rid of it and they don't feel so guilty about it and the last repair cafe we had we had somebody coming along from Cambridge shared waste and they had some recycling facility for small electrical items so that was very useful engaging locally well we have engaged with our local parish councillors for example with the zero carbon communities grant environmental schemes we've worked with the local parish councillors we did a thing for the elections last year it was county council and mayoral elections last year and we arranged for green questions to report to all the candidates and we got the answers and published a newsletter extra with all the answers to these questions to give people information before they voted we have worked with Heidi Allen when she was the MP and also we've attended Anthony Brown's environment forums and coordinated questions for those we respond to local consultations for example the busway east west rail greenways all this kind of thing and we do work with local businesses for example if a green business starts up or we get to hear of green business we publish it publicize it in the newsletter and we're also going to be working with the granary at Stapleford we're going to be doing some green exhibitions later on this year engaging nationally well some of us went down to the 2019 the time is now lobby about climate change at parliament and what came out of that was the discussions with Heidi Allen about climate change policy and she was involved before unfortunately she left later that year in the general election but before that she was working with a group about climate change and then finally I've put in on to the handout I've put some links so local groups such as Cambridge carbon footprint and so forth and also national groups such as the climate coalition and hope for the future both of which are engaging on climate change and then I would just say that there's a very similar group to us working in a rather different environment near Stockport and it's called Sustainable Living in the Heatons and so I've given you the link to that to give a different kind of perspective on similar issues and I think that's about it from me really but I'm happy to answer any questions thank you very much thank you very much Linda that was really informative thank you and again like Linda said we'll put all the links later and email at the recording plus all the links that have been given today so without much further ado I think we need to crack on and lead on to the Q&A sessions so if anybody would like to ask any questions any of our guest speakers will be able to help so we've got anybody this is always that bit at the beginning isn't it with everybody's I've got a question ooh I don't know do I need to raise my hand no you're speaking of a spine let's just leave it hi Barbara I'm Barbara from Longstead Parish Council and I've heard Alison speak before and thank you for a small parish like ours you know I can see benefits of both the community led plan but I can also see the differential between the neighbourhood plan and I'm due this evening to go to first steering group of our so-called neighbourhood planning meeting and I suspect that they're going to ask me and I don't know if it's possible whether you can have the two running in tandem so that you can still tackle issues that might be more akin to a community plan as opposed to the neighbourhood plan or whether really that's not a sensible thing to do with the volume of work I think that's probably key isn't it the volume of work I think Alison for me so I don't know if this is something that perhaps you might want to answer I'm not wishing to muddy the waters any but it is possible within a neighbourhood plan to put in community aspirations and some of the neighbourhood plans that are unworkable groups I'm working with at the moment have indeed done that so that they include a little sort of element that they might have included in a community led plan are actually included in the neighbourhood plan they don't get formally assessed in going through examination or sort of referendum it's just that they're there so I think probably sometimes if you are working on a neighbourhood plan other issues that aren't necessarily relevant for actually including as policies in the neighbourhood plan do actually come up and it probably is something that you could work alongside and run the two together it is a bit sort of volunteers whether or not they're both neighbourhood plan can be quite difficult to do but an equally sort of a community led plan probably takes up a fair amount of volunteer time so yes it is possible to run the two alongside I would say Sure and the second question that I'll stop there so the big last question is would you encourage people from the moment they start really to get somebody from South Cams involved in the work that goes on by the steering group or do you think not until you're at the point of where you're first drafting your plan Is this neighbourhood plan we're talking about all the neighbourhoods One of the first things you need to do is decide what area the plan is going to be so you need to get your neighbourhood area designated which is a formal application that you have to make to the Greater Cambridge Planning Service so that's something to contact me and I can send you an application form out in terms of trying to decide on what issues then obviously you have to talk with your local community to see what issues they're wanting to put in the plan and what are the key things that you need to try and resolve within the community and that then might lead to some community initiatives that could go into a community led plan but certainly talk with us the last thing we want is people to be working on a plan and you've suddenly got a whole finished draft and right this is the fate of Complee Allison we like you to keep in dialogue with us please rather than disappearing and sort of never hearing from you apart from when you think you've got a final plan Thank you, thank you very much Thank you Barbara Have we got any more questions Hi there Hi, I'm Chris O'Brien I'm on Shetford Parish Council First of all, thanks very much to all the speakers it was really quite inspiring to hear all the activities that are going on so thank you very much I had a question about the community chest funding and I suppose I was interested in what you envisage someone might spend £2,000 or up to £2,000 on what kind of activities would that fund as part of a community plan community led plan process and I sort of asked that because I also see that the up to £2,000 for biodiversity projects so I suppose I would perhaps veer towards going for that and then seeing if community led plan could be delivered without the need for formal funding given all the assistance that you sort of outline that you offer I wondered what your thoughts were really on At the moment we have ring ffence amounts ring ffence by diversity so that's £10,000 and then we've also got £50,000 which is ring ffence for community led plans as well but then we've got our traditional community chest grant as well for any kind of project that's going on so depending on what order you want to do it in is entirely up to you but when it comes to community led plans it's not the actions that come out of it that would get funded it's actually the producing of the plan so if you've got any costs associated with perhaps hiring a hall or something or perhaps printing costs or anything associated with the actual production of the plan that's what we could fund and then coming out of that if you have some obviously you have your action plan then you've got your projects that come out of that if you wanted to apply for any of those projects just bear in mind that you can't apply twice within the same financial year you would have to wait until the next financial year but once you've got that under way actually time goes quite quickly so probably it wouldn't be a massive issue so then all you could apply for the biodiversity project that you wanted is entirely up to you so it's quite everything's on our community chest web page is quite clear what we fund, what we don't fund and there's a really useful table at the bottom as to obviously sizes of parish councils as well so currently we've also got a Queen's Jubilee ring-fenced amounts as well so we've relaxed some of our criteria so that any size parish council can apply but our traditional community chest that still stands that you'd have to be a very small parish council 160 electors or less but any of the other ones it doesn't matter what size parish council you are so it's worth just going through it and you know obviously I'm more than willing to sort of have a one-to-one conversation with you at a later date if you've got a few ideas together by then does that help or is that anything? Yeah thank you so feasibly we could apply for biodiversity and the production of a plan concurrently? They would have to be carefully just stepping forward if I'm not getting this right but as I understand it you can only apply for one community chest application within one financial year so you couldn't do both at the same time concurrently Okay thank you I did also while I'm here I had a question for Liz around High Hub which I thought was absolutely fantastic as a one-time journalist myself and I wondered how much it cost to set up and how you financed that sort of thing because I imagine it's not insignificant for a website like that It's really interesting actually that you say that because we anticipated the cost would be higher than they were but that's partly because we managed to get a team together that has a very diverse and very deep set of skills so I myself am a journalist basically but we've also got the lady who runs the Facebook group in the village which is a very strong Facebook group we've got a digital expert he doesn't call himself an expert but he's a website guy we've got somebody who's run a business before a small business who does all the accounts and the finance and all the rest of it and then there's a member in fact of the parish council who has a deep and very long-standing knowledge exactly what's going on and who the players are and can advise on that that team meant that we were able to minimise costs in some areas which was good but in terms of where the funding came from we did a crowdfunding in the village to start with so we did the research to start with to find out if people want it we had a 95% yes on about 160 responses on that we ran a crowdfunding that got us £2,000 got £500 from the parish council a thousand thank you from South Cams and £6,000 from the lottery and that then we started selling advertising and that has kept us going for two years so a lot of it was spent up front but we've managed then to use some of that to keep generating money to pay to the administrator etc so the financial model I have to say going into the future is looking tricky on the basis that we are an extraordinarily strong team and if any one of us goes how are we going to replace that so that's really the challenge that we're facing at the moment but we've got plans in place that we're thinking about how to develop it's about the next step so yes it all depends on what skills you can pull in from your volunteers I think with the answer to that OK great thank you Any other questions? I think we're doing quite well time wise aren't we Bill I think It looks as though we might have I think we've covered all the questions OK so if I'd like to sort of conclude really I'd just like to say very many thanks to our speakers all of our speakers but in particular to our external speakers Liz and Linda for really interesting presentations also thanks to you for attending I sense that you have found it very useful and maybe even a little bit inspiring to start your own project of course if after the meeting you think of a question you wish to have asked now check the community-led plans website first of all but I'm sure if you contact Emma she'll be delighted to help with any questions that you have so thank you all for attending and I wish you all a pleasant evening and I look forward to hearing about your plans in due course Thank you very much Good night everyone Thank you very much