Four themes from early workshops and interviews

From the project research team at IVAR

Like most research projects, this one began with a ‘scoping’ stage to make sure that we were asking the right questions and to get more ideas about who might want to contribute to the research. In this short summary, we are sharing a few messages that came out of the scoping interviews we carried out and workshops we attended to help us shape the research. Here’s a quick overview of four main themes we found:

1. ‘A local base for a national conversation’ — People we spoke to want assurances that the research will be rooted in local communities and driven by what those communities need and want.
2. ‘What motivates people to engage?’ — We need to understand what motivates people to get involved with communities, and what puts them off. By understanding this we can begin to look at how to broaden the range of people getting involved in communities.
3. ‘If you can’t create jobs and enterprise, you won’t regenerate your community’ — People identified a range of issues where they thought community development can and needs to continue to make contribution. Some said people’s economic prosperity and economic regeneration is critical.
4. ‘It may not be important to start with, but real change requires funds’ — We picked up a variety of views about funding for work with communities.

Find out more in our summary document. There are other themes that we plan to explore through the questions that we are asking in the next stage and the people, groups and organisations that we are inviting to respond, but we would really like to hear your reactions. Tweet using #Empowered2020s or email enquiries@ivar.org.uk