As the Northern Network project develops, we’ve been keen to talk to people involved in the setting up or running of Green Community Hubs to understand how best we can support them.
Our Project Manager, Sam has been leading in-person community engagement events at different venues across the North including Cumbria, Lancashire, Merseyside, Manchester, and Yorkshire. We were delighted that over 65 people were able to join us for these, including people from a range of backgrounds such as healthcare professionals, and people from large established charities as well as smaller organisations.
The sessions included an overview of the project and what we were hoping to achieve, followed by three mini-workshops exploring values, ideals, skills, and resources.
In our first workshop, we asked participants to discuss a set of big ideas including Community and Collaboration; People and Prospects; Climate Emergency; Health and Wellbeing; Radical Change; and Leadership and Development.
Our second workshop tasked participants with taking the time to imagine their perfect green community space. We then asked them who they would grow, what would they nurture, and what would be the outcome.
Our last workshop asked people to evaluate their hub’s own strengths and to tell us about their developmental needs.
Thanks to everyone that joined us. We’ll be evaluating all this fantastic research and using it to inform the development of the network going forward.
