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The Local Landscapes Toolkit
- The Tools
The toolkit has been
designed to help local community groups to get their Local Landscapes
Project started and keep it going for themselves.
Step One
Inform the Monmouthshire County Council that you want to
undertake a Local Landscapes project, and speak to either the
Sustainable Communities Officer (01633) 644108 or to Rural Community
Action Monmouthshire (01873) 736037. Approach local organisations
including your Community Council to ask if they would be interested in
supporting the project. Community Councils can themselves start a
project, but the wider community also needs to be involved. Find
out about other initiatives already underway locally which you may be
able to benefit from.
Step Two
 Arrange a meeting with interested local people, this does not
need to be a formal meeting. Decide on the aims of your project
and consider drawing up a simple constitution if you are not already a
group with a constitution (a model constitution is included in the
toolkit). You could decide to work with another organisation such
as the local Community Council to deal with management of funding and
financial matters. Decide on the best method for finding out from
local people what is important locally and their ideas for exploring it
further - this could be a local questionnaire survey, a workshop, a
meeting, or other activity and there is detailed advice on how to
arrange these activities, sample questions for a survey and more ideas
in the toolkit. Send off the registration form in the toolkit to
Monmouthshire County Council.
Step Three
Let local people know about the project and hold an event to
find out what they think is important locally. The toolkit
describes in detail three tried and tested ways of doing this - choose
the one that you think will encourage the most local people to
participate.
Step Four
All the information and ideas are collected together and
presented to the community at a discussion meeting, where local people
can decide how to take the project forward. This should be an
exciting and stimulating meeting, resulting in lots of ideas for further
projects that will identify ways for the issues that have been raised to
be addressed. Your meeting might also identify ideas that need
further investigation to see if they are feasible. Full
information on organising and running a meeting of this nature are given
in the toolkit.
Step Five
Your meeting should have identified one or more projects related
to your local landscape that the community can begin and keep going.
You may need to apply for funding for this, and advice is available from
RCA Monmouthshire - seek advice early. It is a good idea to
prepare an Action Plan showing how you have reached this point, and
identifying what you need the funding for, as well as the work that the
community will be contributing to it. The Action Plan need not be
a lengthy or complicated document, but it will help any applications for
funding.
Step Six
Undertake your chosen project - be realistic about what you can
achieve and the time that it might take!
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