CTDU October - November 2007!

News about our BIG application

Annual General Meeting

Board of Directors meetings

Doing What You Do: Only Better

Clackmannanshire Learning Network events

Falkirk Learning Network events

Participatory Action Research

CTDU: It Does What It Says On The Tin

Bothkennar garden development

BIG NEWS

At CTDU we recently carried out research into the training opportunities for community members to help them to participate in Community Health Partnerships, Community Regeneration Boards and Community Planning Partnerships. The research was funded by the Big Lottery's Investing in Ideas Fund.

The first stage of our study involved asking people who are representing their communities to fill in a short questionnaire, to find out if they'd had training on any of the following:- Meeting Skills, Assertiveness skills, Speaking in front of groups, Note taking, Listening skills, The role of a community representative, Constructive debating skills, Making sense of budgets

The second stage of our research involved speaking to a number of people who responded to the first stage questionnaire in more depth about their training needs.

The information we collected during our research has formed the basis of our outline proposal to the Big Lottery's Investing in Communities fund for a new project which we've called 'The Reps Factor'.

A BIG "thank you" to the many people who participated in this stage of our research.

'The Reps Factor'

The Big Lottery liked our outline proposal, and have invited us to submit a full application to their Dynamic Inclusive Communities Fund.

A spanner in the works is that the Big Lottery have announced a review of their Dynamic Inclusive Communities fund to ensure that the projects it funds meet their set outcomes and have the biggest impact.

This means that we will not hear wheter our application is successful or not until mid-October 2008!

This is devastating news for small organisations like CTDU that don't have the financial resources to survive without project funding. We we are currently looking to the local CVS's and SCVO to appeal to the Big Lottery on our behalf to bring this date forward.

Click here to email us support about our Big Lottery application.

CTDU Annual General Meeting

Friday, 30th November 2007
12 noon to 2.00 p.m

St Mungo's RC Church Hall, Mar Street, Alloa

Please join us

to remember and celebrate the work we’ve done together this year and to hear our plans for the year to come.

• Lunch from 12 noon
• AGM Business 12.45 p.m. – 1.15 p.m.
• Presentations of our work this year 1.15 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.

Please let us know by Friday, 16th November 2007 if you have any special dietary or access needs, or need a crèche. Hope to see you there.

CTDU associates

Doing What You Do - Only Better, our associates launch event in Clackmannanshire looked at using the arts to help you work through a useful evaluation process in a creative and enjoyable way. The workshop was led by CTDU Associate workers Jean Bareham and Jan Nimmo.


Jean led the morning session on evaluation process. In small groups we evaluated our journey to the training day, decided on indicators eg traffic, scenery, stress levels for a good or bad journey and then judged our journey using a scale of 1 to 5. Then we were asked to draw our journey to give a more visual presentation and decide if drawing the journey highlighted any problems that had been missed using the scale. Jean stressed the importance of being rigourous and showing that you have been scientific.

Freire's model:

What? .....happened
Why? ......did it happen?
So What?.. bring it together
Now What? ... Action Plan

In the afternoon Jan showed us a range of art methods that are useful in evaluation e.g PowerPoint presentations, video, and in the last hour we made a banner which participants decided to call 'evaluate this' to show that art can give form to feelings.

Some comments from participants evaluation of the day were:

I left with lots of inspiration which I hope to share with the team, young people, parents and volunteers.

Really useful day in all aspects, I'm delighted I came and will definitely use all I learned.

Today was very useful on thinking through the whole evaluation process rather than just gathering evidence.

How important evaluation is for future funding.

Better understanding of evaluation process, it has been a positive learning experience.

I have new ideas and learned that arts can be a tool for evaluation.

Clackmannanshire's Regeneration Communities
CTDU's Learning Network event!

13 people participated in our learning network event in March 2007.

We had a really interesting presentation from Arran from the Clackmannanshire Youth Forum. Well done all the young folk involved in the making of their video - it's fantastic!

After a great buffet lunch thanks to CTDU volunteer Ann, and a bit of networking, everyone joined in a workshop on Community Banners led by CTDU associate worker Jan Nimmo. Most of us took a bit of persuading to get going with our 'artwork' but we were soon cracking on with the job and enjoying working on the task.

Jan showed us how well community banners can communicate ideas, values and aims through images and symbols that can cross language barriers and involve people of different abilities. We discovered that banner making can be a great exercise in team building, skills sharing, and confidence building. Everyone worked very hard to create a banner around the topic of Community Spirit.

Falkirk's Regeneration Communities
CTDU's Learning Network event!

17 local activists participated at this network event in March 2007.

We had an interesting presentation from the Public Participation Forum and Community Health Partnership. This group of ordinary people has been very helpful to the Parents of Children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) group that CTDU has been supporting. They have helped to promote the SEN group's DVD to different services. The SEN groups DVD raises awareness of the little things people can do that really make a difference and help children with additional support needs.

One of the key messages from the presentation by the Public Participation Forum was to encourage all members of the public to go along to local community health partnership meetings and give their views or suggest how improvements can be made on the health service. So watch your local paper for adverts of meetings in your area.

Next CTDU Associate worker Alex Staerck led a taster workshop called 'Who are We' . Alex had us all moving about and working hard! Two groups had to describe what their group did, what their aims are to another two groups. The only snag was the groups weren't allowed to tell their groups name! Thanks Alex, the workshop was great fun, but also serious because we all realised that we need to be thinking about our image and how we present ourselves.

After a great lunch (thanks Ann!) CTDU Associate worker Tansy Lee Moir led us through a workshop on Community Banner on the theme of Community Spirit (see above for information about banner making). Thanks to Tansy's pre-workshop preparation of the banner and some of the background images, we created a banner in one hour! That's got to be a record ...

"CTDU: It does what it says on the tin"

A review of CTDU's recent Volunteers' Mentoring Project is available on DVD and in a written report both called "CTDU: It does what it says on the tin"

Phone 01324 832040, or email Fiona or Rosemary.

We are very fortunate to be based in the beautiful setting of the RSPB Bothkennar reserve, a peaceful and interesting environment for our members to learn from and enjoy. RSPB are particularly interested in protecting the coastline and birds whose numbers have been falling rapidly. Tree sparrows and yellow hammers frequent our newly developed garden, and grey partridges and skylarks inhabit the fields behind the centre. Many other birds can be seen, particularly in autumn and winter.

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