Community Engagement

Our engagement process has a ‘can-do’ attitude: it instils in individuals the skills, knowledge, confidence and belief that they can make a difference. It seeks to be inclusive and promote social inclusion and equality of opportunity.

Our approach to community engagement takes a person-centred approach, which builds on skills and activities that are already present in the community, as sustainable development can only be build on indigenous resources.

The nature of ‘ideal’ engagement is as we see it is a dialectic relationship between providers and communities to come to the holistic solutions that are best for the communities in question. We want to work with stakeholders within communities to identify what are specific needs and what are the actions that need to be taken to meet those needs.

 We have used certain tools and techniques that can be used to drive this process forward, such as awareness raising sessions, stakeholder interviews, local champions and role models and working groups or engagement forums.

Recent projects operating on this template include:

WellandXTRA – Developed from a “path-finding” research project with businesses from the rural community of the Welland, which identified a gap in service provision related to Welland SME presence on the web, and the potential for linking more easily into support networks. This consultation exercise led to the development of the WellandXTRA web portal, a flexible website with powerful search capabilities to look for information by town, subject matter or other criteria specifically designed to help track down funding, events, support services and networks available near and relevant for the user.

We are here to listen, create and deliver - to help you succeed.