Our Community project in Cove & Kilcreggan’s multiple consultations: Why, which, when?
The various consultations for the OC project and their connections: an infographic (thanks to Ali Mills & Britta Letz, OC project, 2024)
The Our Community (OC) project has commissioned or initiated multiple consultations on the development for Cove & Kilcreggan villages in the past 18 months.
As we move towards the final few consultations, here is a review of those already having taken place, and the remaining upcoming consultations.
Cove & Kilcreggan community survey, February 2023 (online & paper-based): During the second half of 2022, Our Community project members spoke to multiple organisations and individuals across the community support sector to understand what help might be available to help us work towards a Local Place Plan (LPP). In Autumn 2022, three organisations were interviewed and, through a process of independent scoring, SKS Scotland were chosen to work with us during the initial phase of the project. SKS Scotland is an advisory organisation offering bespoke support for communities across Scotland.
SKS began our series of consultations with a community-wide survey in February 2023. The survey questions were created from a grant award profile, using the experience of Claire Whyte and Nicky Hesketh, known community challenges and previous local community action plans.
In the quest to make the survey as accessible as possible, and to match the ambition of having a high response rate, we hand-delivered copies to households and created an online version. Various businesses across the peninsula also came on board to help us circulate the survey. We had a response rate of 33% (vs total local population) - contextually the highest response rate SKS had seen in their many years of surveying. The survey had the added benefit of being publicity for the project, which meant that it helped us reach more people in future surveys and the upcoming consultations.
6 key themes emerged as important from the surveys: Environment, Kilcreggan & Cove villages, business & local economy, community wealth building, transport, health & well-being. Strongly supported topics within these themes included: sports, paths, heritage, arts, biodiversity and climate change, coastline & marine area, business, Kilcreggan Village Centre, energy & housing. It is from these themes that the community groups were formed.
This initial survey has formed the bedrock of the many subsequent community consultations and surveys that the Our Community project has undertaken. The consultations aimed to include as many community residents as possible and to probe deeper into specific issues and areas of focus, before the Local Place Plan drafting commences.
Village-level workshop, September 2023 (in-person event): An in-person event at Cove Burgh Hall to present survey results and 6 key themes to the community. The 9 community groups formed from these themes were also presented: Business, Housing & Energy, Green Group, Sports & Leisure, Clearwater, Paths & Trails, Heritage, Arts and Kilcreggan Village. Attendees were able to join the groups that interested them and provide further feedback on the results and groups. Importantly, people were asked to volunteer to run each group and arrange initial meetings with all group members.
Community groups formed, October 2023 onwards: Since October, the groups have been working on their activities based on needs & interests of the village residents with the aim of initiating projects within the villages. They have also been drafting scoping documents outlining the visions & plans of action of the groups in the short, medium and long terms. These feed into both immediate plans of action as well as medium- and long-term plans for Kilcreggan Village centre as well as for the Local Place Plan through the community mapping negotiations (outlined below point number 7).
Schools workshop, November 2023 (in-person event): Kilcreggan & Cove have one primary school within the village boundaries. Ali Mills, a graphic designer and artist in the village & Gauri Raje, a storyteller who had previously worked with the schoolchildren, ran interactive sessions with each class. Through drawings and explanations, the children were encouraged to share what they loved most about the villages they were growing up in, and what they would like to see in the future in the villages. An exhibition organised and manned by the children took place within the school premises, where they shared their art, models, information they had collected and their ideas with the adults in the village including Our Community members and the members of the C&K Community Council. Their drawings form part of the Our Community project website.
Consultation with Young People, July 2024 (in-person event): To understand what the local young people would like to see in our villages in the future and what they love about our villages today, discussions and surveys were undertaken through the Youth cafe in July 2024. We used a government - recommended framework of The Place Standard Tool for Young People. It is a framework to structure conversations about place including the physical aspects of a place (for example buildings, transport links, green spaces or other spaces in a community) and social spaces (for example do people feel they have enough say in decision-making). The outcome of this survey exercise will feed into the final community negotiation workshop event.
Kilcreggan Village centre workshops, July - September 2024 (in-person events): The Kilcreggan Village Centre group found that there were several distinct and overlapping concerns that touched upon the future development of the Cove & Kilcreggan villages. Bearing this in mind, a procurement process was undertaken in 2024 to appoint independent consultants to create spatial and functional diagrams for Kilcreggan Bay through a series of community events from July to September 2024. Scott+Simmons, consultants based in Helensburgh, were appointed at the end of due process. Their remit was to help focus people and guide them through the important things to think about, including constraints that the residents experience, and to produce ideas based on the input from each of the meetings. These ideas can be commented on at each subsequent meeting to improve the proposals. The process will be participatory and consultative in nature and will place the residents of Cove & Kilcreggan at the heart of this process.
Two workshops have taken place so far - on the 29th July and the 12th August. The first workshop used the Place Standard tool - a government recommended method to structure conversations about place. These workshops have given the residents an opportunity in small group discussions to highlight specific issues affecting the village and to talk about the opportunities for development that would support the financial stability & growth of the village centre, the businesses that operate from it, the residents & the village users.
More meetings are scheduled in September 2024 to deepen the discussions, and present the results and ideas from the first two meetings.
The outcome of these discussions will feed into the community negotiation workshops and the Local Place Plan document.
7. Community Negotiation workshops, October 2024 (upcoming online & in-person event): Community Negotiation workshops are the final stage of our community consultations. Independent consultants who specialise in community negotiation processes will facilitate these workshops. At this final stage, there will be input from all the community groups, stakeholders and residents of Cove & Kilcreggan to consolidate the ideas that have emerged from all the aforementioned consultations. There will be two short online sessions (with recordings available for those who cannot attend), and a final 4 hour in-person event at Cove Burgh Hall. This in-person event will be a negotiated mapping session between different interests and stakeholders to reach an agreement on the location and spatial arrangement of the community’s ideas and aspirations. It will form the basis of the map to be included in our Local Place Plan. Further information about the consultants carrying out these final events will be released in September as the Kilcreggan Village consultations draw to a close. The information will be released on our website and Facebook pages.
Following on from the community responses at the community negotiation workshops, community group scoping documents and Kilcreggan Village consultations, independent consultants SKS, who designed and carried out the initial surveys, will draft the Local Place Plan for Cove & Kilcreggan to be submitted to the Argyll & Bute Council in March 2025.