National Development Programme
Overview
In August 2008, SCDC was awarded a grant from the Scottish Government to promote the use of the VOiCE planning, evaluation and recording tool and to properly evaluate its strengths and weaknesses in practice in order to improve and develop the tool and provide appropriate guidance material. The objectives set out in the programme are to:
- Raise awareness of how to use the VOiCE database tool with 32 Community Planning Partnerships and to support partnerships to use the tool
- Develop VOiCE and its use to meet user agency requirements in at least 6 pilot areas (Development Sites)
- Capture and disseminate learning about how to best use VOiCE to improve the planning and delivery of community engagement activity – with a particular focus on capturing the outcomes of community engagement activity
Raising Awareness
Part of the National Development Programme was to further promote VOiCE through offering awareness sessions to each of the 32 local Community Planning Partnerships across Scotland with a dedicated allocation of follow up support time over the grant period. To date, VOiCE awareness raising seminars have been delivered or offered to all the Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) with follow-up work being undertaken in certain areas.
The reception at the local awareness raising sessions has been very positive and several of the partners within CPPs have stated a commitment to trialling the software to support their own agency’s engagement processes. There has been strong feedback that VOiCE provides a much needed robust framework for conducting, monitoring and evaluating community engagement processes. It is also considered to be of great potential value for use within individual agencies and across partnerships.
In addition awareness-raising sessions have been delivered with a variety of national organisations including the Development Trust Association, HMIE, BEMIS, Learning Link, Scottish Health Council, CEMVO and NHS 24.
Development Sites
Development sites have been established across a range of contexts and themes to test the robustness of VOiCE, gather information on how the tool can be improved and gather case study illustrations of how VOiCE can assist effective community engagement practice and processes.
The development sites were selected to represent a range of types and approaches to community engagement. The selection criteria included an urban and rural split, that they could demonstrate organisational (or partnership) capacity to take forward activity within the time frame of the project and that they could commit to networking and sharing of learning.
The development sites currently in progress are:
Perth and Kinross Council: Based within Perth and Kinross Council this development site aims to bring together all the engagement activity of the 5 key service themes within the council including regeneration, housing and planning. The development site is well progressed and will include bespoke development and training for users of the system based on their feedback. Following initial training and development it is anticipated that VOiCE will be championed at a strategic level.
Edinburgh City Council: This development site is being supported to implement VOiCE through Edinburgh City Partnership's Community Engagement Working Group and particular focus on the Gilmerton Neighbourhood Partnership area. This is a multi agency and community /voluntary sector partnership using VOICE to engage with the local community.
Glasgow City Council, Community Planning,South East Area: This development site is concerned with a strategic partnership approach to joining up community engagement activities across Community Planning structures. The Community Engagement Co-ordinating Group is leading the work with inputs and links developed with the 2 Community Reference Groups, 5 Thematic Management Groups and the 2 Community Planning Partnership Boards. The work in this Development Site is focusing on partnership activities, not individual agency’s own community engagement work.
South Lanarkshire Changing Places: This development site is multi-faceted with all activity overseen by a strategic level multi-disciplinary advisory group. The work continues to build on established community engagement activity in the area. The vision for South Lanarkshire is that VOiCE will become a common system for planning, conducting, recording and evaluating community engagement activity across all partners. Council departments can currently access VOiCE on their main server where it has been set up on Runtime. Agencies external to the local authority are using VOiCE on their own IT systems where they have access to Microsoft Access. Work is well-progressed with this site with one of the key areas of focus being to build the skills of two local community based organisations, Create and Community Links, to conduct community engagement activity on behalf of a range of key agency partners in South Lanarkshire.
Commonwealth Games: This development site is being progressed through Glasgow City Council Corporate Policy Department. The site used VOiCE to support engagement practice, record and track progress and in the review and evaluation of the process of community engagement. The community engagement focused on gathering public and specific communities’ views on the potential health impact of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. The development site has been particularly supported to review the participatory appraisal (PA) process used as part of the community engagement fieldwork; facilitate a review session of the analysis, plan and do stages of the process with a selection of key stakeholders and the writing of a review paper to include recommendations for future community engagement activity within the Commonwealth Games preparation, delivery and legacy.
Equally Well Test Sites (Dundee and Glasgow – Planning): The aims of the Equally Well test sites are to work in defined communities to improve health & wellbeing and tackle health inequalities, to test how well-evidenced interventions impact on the community, what measures demonstrate impact, and to test the added value of focusing partnership resources on tackling health inequalities.
The Dundee Equally Well test site is being supported to look at using VOiCE in planning, delivering and evaluating a discrete piece of community engagement activity. In the Glasgow Planning Test Site, support is being provided to review completed community engagement activity, in order to develop learning from that and informing the further work of the Test Site in relation to integrating health and planning outcomes. Further work will be done with these sites in relation to developing shared learning from the use of VOiCE.
The Bridge – Borders CVS: This site is in the early stages of development. More information will be added as work progresses.
Glasgow City Council, Community Planning, Equalities (South East Area: This development site will focus on community engagement to plan a community event (“Eid on the Drive”) in South East Glasgow. The event which has been taking place over the last three years happens during the time of the Eid religious celebrations. The community event aims to reduce anti-social behaviour amongst young people and provide residents with a contained and safe environment for the community as a whole to celebrate Eid. Another key purpose of the event is to encourage integration amongst the diverse communities within the South East of Glasgow.
This development site will use VOiCE and be supported to conduct community engagement prior to planning the 2010 Eid on the Drive event. The aim will be to find out the views and opinions of the community about what they want from the Eid on the Drive event and for the community to influence the programme for the event.
National Events
The first national VOiCE event was held on Thursday 23rd April in the Jury’s Inn, Glasgow. The event was split into two seminars, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The first acted as a learning exchange for the development sites. The second one was an open session where those using VOiCE, or interested in using VOiCE participated in open workshops along with key personnel from the development sites to learn from their experience and gather ideas to test out within their own fields and areas of practice.
The event proved to be very successful with 22 participants from development sites attending in the morning and 69 participants at the open session in the afternoon. Evaluations were very positive with the majority of people finding the event very relevant and appropriate to their work.
The report of the morning session can be accessed here.
A further shared learning event for development sites is planned for 26th November 2009 and there will be a National Conference to mark the end of the Support Programme early in 2010.
Further Information
For further information about any aspect of the National Development Programme please contact any of the following VOiCE Team members at SCDC.
David Allan – david@scdc.org.uk
Paul Nelis – paul@scdc.org.uk
Lucia Dhliwayo – lucia@scdc.org.uk
