All Saints Parish Council held a Meet the Council event in November to engage the community and launch their Communications Programme. Their clerk very kindly sent through a blog post about the event; read on to see what they planned and how the event went including all the feedback they were able to get from their community!
All Saints Parish Council held their first ever “Meet the Council” on Saturday 23 November event in their Village Hall. With relatively new Clerk and Members the team wants to develop initiatives to enhance communication, engagement and involvement across the whole of the All Saints community. This way seemed a great opportunity to do just this!
Each of our five councillors has an overall responsibility for a particular area of the council’s focus. At the event parishioners were able chat informally with councillors, asking various questions around communications, operations, finance, planning or environment related. The Clerk was on hand to answer more general questions regarding the running of the parish council.
The Council also set up boards inviting residents to write responses to two questions, “All Saints is a great place to live because…” and “All Saints would be an even better place to live if ….”. We gathered many responses, which has helped the council get a feel of what is of importance to parishioners. For question one, the overriding feedback was the people, the community and the number of activities and events going on in the parish. For question two, responses focussed on, speeding in the parish, dog bins, broadband cover and the addition of more community events such as coffee mornings.
The Council had previously launched its new Communications policy with the fundamentals driven within its COMPAS programme, an acronym from Communications Programme for All Saints. A continuous presentation loop giving the details of the programme ran throughout the event.
The Council had already introduced its draft Environmental policy (Oct 24) and set up a Working Group. It was good timing for this to also be discussed and for feedback from residents to share their thoughts for improving the overall environmental awareness and biodiversity across the parish.
I think its is fair to say that everyone agreed that the morning was a great success and could be considered as an annual event. A great opportunity to keep the community updated about plans and opportunities and receive feedback in an informal, relaxed manner.
We love this story from All Saints Parish Council, and it sounds like a fantastic way to engage the community.
If you have a story you would like to share with us, then please let us know!