Community

Community must be at the heart of the decision-making process of the project. Community demand for the project should be demonstrated through consultation evidence and projects must be designed and delivered by communities themselves.

We’d like to know how many people are in your project’s community and how many of these people you aim to actively engage with during the project. For instance, your organisation might represent a large community of 5,000 people but you might only be focusing on a few hundred of these people through the project activities due to geography or the level of engagement you intend to have with project participants.

We also expect applicants to demonstrate how they will work in partnership with other local organisations that are engaged in similar or related work.

Things to think about

Your community

We want to know who your community is and how you would define it. This may be all the people in the town or region you are based in (what we call a geographical community), or it might be that your organisation represents a particular subset of people within a larger geographic area (we would call this a community of interest).

Geographical community

This is where a community is defined by a geographical centre - there are many sources of useful statistics about population size, demographic split, area boundaries, etc. One of the easiest to use is the Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics website, http://www.sns.gov.uk/ where you can use postcodes to find a detailed profile of your area, with demographic breakdown and information about health, crime, income, education, etc. If you have other data to back this up, then please use this and reference the source.

Community of interest

This is where a community is defined by the activities or interests of its members – for example; a workplace, a university, the users of a community resource, people within a specific age range or ethnicity – please tell us how you would define your community. This community should still be based locally to each other and not Scotland-wide.

Community consultation

Where did the idea for the project come from? Who has been involved in developing the original idea for this project? In this section, please tell us about the consultations or local research you have done or intend to do.  This should clearly demonstrate how these results show a need or demand for the project.

Community involvement

Tell us what mechanisms will be put in place to ensure the project community will be able to affect the decision-making processes of the project and how ongoing consultation will happen. For instance, will there be a sub group, steering groups, and regular consultations?

Partnership working

When scoping out project ideas it often becomes apparent that some activities may be duplicating those carried out by other organisations in the community. Applicants must demonstrate how they will work in partnership with other local organisations that are engaged in similar or related work.