Colvend & Southwick Community Council
Local Place Plan Team
Meeting No.7 - 18th April 2023 10am at Tranquillity, Colvend
Present: S.W.Pain (Convenor), J.Coates, D.Reilly (Consultant), R.Morriss
Apologies: M.Rosindale, P.Shaw, R.Morriss
- Matters Arising from the minutes of the meeting on 27th March 2023
- JC reported that the community launch meeting in Colvend Public Hall on Friday 31st March had been well received. There were approx. 40 members of the community present. SWP indicated that since that time, a number of emails had been received via the colvendconnect@gmail.com address, with suggestions for both the plan and the process. In particular, there were questions about the LPP Team being comprised of all males. There was a request that some ladies & young people be involved in the team.
Action: DR to test out with school bus passengers if anyone would like to be involved
Action: JC to approach Georgie Mabbs to see if she would have an interest in becoming involved.
b. SWP mentioned that one of the emails received following the meeting on 31/3/23, was from a lady near Barend, who had experience of running community consultation events. She had been invited to attend today’s meeting, but sent her apologies. SWP had a long telephone conversation with her over the weekend. Her approach was to use independent facilitators to run a series of workshop sessions. This involved employing people to do this and unless additional funding was available, we would have to do that ourselves. The subjects of her consultations were very specific and nothing like as broad as we attempting to achieve. She also made the observation that she did not use the community WhatsApp groups, and so she only found out about the meeting by chance. She advised that we should have a communications process that is not purely electronic, so that we get to those people who are not on WhatsApp. There was some discussion about making greater use of Facebook. JC indicated that the Colvend Public Hall Committee are revising their Facebook page and it was suggested that the LPP Team could link in with this route for wider communication.
Action: JC to approach Annette Neat to see if we could piggy back on their Facebook page.
For information: There are 275 residents registered with the 4 WhatsApp groups. Most of these represent properties where there are more than 1 resident. If each property on average has 2 residents, then the WhatsApp groups get to 550 out of the 780 residents in our area.
SWP noted that the colvendconnect website facility for posting messages about the LPP is not working. He has discussed this with S.King and it is not possible to resolve this with the current website.
- Consultation arrangements
- Electronic Survey
There was some discussion about the best way to carry out the community consultation. The receipt of email suggestions that had been circulated before the meeting demonstrated how laborious it was going to be to collate and compile responses. There needed to be a way to automatically collate the responses and align the ideas with our “key areas of attention”. SWP had circulated a suggestion for an electronic survey, based on Microsoft Forms, that could be sent, or made available to residents. This would have the advantage that ideas would be automatically grouped into our 10 categories. It was agreed that this survey should be amended to provide more information about what the LPP was and then used as a basis for collecting & collating data. It was felt that some of the basic data should be collected before we attempted to hold a drop-in session, so that some of the ideas put forward through the survey could be used to stimulate discussion at a future drop-in session. It was agreed that the survey should ask for email contact details, but not names.
Action: SWP to revise the survey form and circulate for comment.
b) Community activities
There was a discussion that we should take every opportunity of consulting with people when they were attending community gatherings. 3 immediate gatherings were initially identified:
- Colvend Hall Market on Saturday 22nd April
- Rockcliffe gathering at the Baron’s Craig on 6th May
- Colvend Family Gala on Saturday 27th May
Action: No-one was available to man a stall at the next Colvend Market, but DR & SWP would set up the two roller banners and the display board on the stage of the hall during the Market (Meet at 7pm Friday)
Action: JC to discuss with Alison Forrest about having the display at the Rockcliffe Gathering
Action: SWP & JC to ensure that there is a stall available at the Gala for use as an information hub about the LPP.
3) Date of next meeting
Please note that the zoom contract has been cancelled and no unlimited length zoom meetings will be possible after 23rd April. The contract was cancelled because we had used up the zoom allocation from the Community Led Local Vision funding.
Date of next meeting to be confirmed. Please note that SWP is hoping to be on holiday from 26th April to 6thMay.
S.W.Pain 19/4/2023