Kate Braithwaite on Positive Outlooks for Rural Communities

There are my notes from the session with Kate Braithwaite of the Carnegie Trust at the Sense of Place Conference.

What are the important sources of life satisfaction and well being for community?

We need to value:

• natural
• human
• social
• cultural
• built and
• financial capital

Only that last 2 on this list are currently valued.

A strange thing is going on in this country – we currently need to prove how deprived we are to get funding. If we improve, we need to look for new statistics to prove that we are failing. Parts of England can appear more deprived than Romania using these indices.

There are three enabling conditions for community wellbeing

• skills
• community led planning
• assets (not just land and building but people, culture, political, natural, social, ideas etc – these are harder to measure!)

First encourage people to list the assets of a place. This opens people up to the idea that their place does have potential. The best community led planning involves everyone and is not about setting the community up for a ‘project’ but for life.

Facilitating community led planning is a skill area that we are short of but which is in growing demand.

Community Land Trusts are a mechanism for the democratic ownership of land by the local community

The Carnegie UK Trust has launched a ‘Fiery Spirits‘ Community of Practice to connect people.

There are big challenges ahead. Instead of focusing on what the problems might be, we need to think about how we can best deal with things whatever.

Cargnegie has, or is planning collaborations with the following organisations;

Highlands and Islands Enterprise

Centre for Alternative Technology

Eden

Tipperary Institute

Falkland Centre for Stewardship

The image below is a photograph of the visual notes taken at the conference.