Developing Our Plan 2016-2020

Raising awareness

Community planning is about giving local people a voice; we have been actively seeking the involvement of local people, businesses and community and voluntary organisations for their views in shaping the community plan.  We have adopted methods of engagement which take a people focus approach and encourage active participation throughout our process.

Building our evidence base

In November 2015 a NISRA statistician was procured to provide a comprehensive baseline statistical report for the Borough and will inform the development of the first Community Plan.  The reports provide a robust overview of the demography of the area as well as the key statistics grouped under each of the thematic working groups.

Thematic working group process

Throughout our early engagement we identified and agreed 6 strategic themes and 4 cross cutting themes.  The community planning process was progressed through the establishment of 6 task and finish working groups, one for each of the themes identified.  We placed open invitations in all our local papers inviting people to get involved in the process.  We also directly targeted individuals or groups which we thought may be interested.  The overall objective of the thematic working group process was to support the development of the plan for each theme and gain consensus on a baseline data report.

We held 18 thematic working group workshops in which 245 people expressed their views and opinions on where our priorities should be focused.  All the work from each of the groups was distilled and pulled together into the draft community plan.