PARTICIPATORY AND ARTS METHODS

CTDU Projects:

Equality Matters
Funded by the Falkirk Community Planning Partnership;

Mentoring Support Project
Funded by the Voluntary Action Fund;

Up for IT ;-)
Funded by the Lloyds TSB Foundation for Scotland

Aims and activities of CTDU

The Community Training and Development Unit is committed to people working together at grassroots level and in networks to learn more about, and fight against the poverty, powerlessness and lack of respect which restrict people's lives. With core funding from Clackmannanshire and Falkirk Councils, CTDU offers capacity building training to grassroots members of community and voluntary organisations.

CTDU aims to be a resourceful ally to enable groups and individuals to:

• act together effectively and co-operatively, by offering skills training and information to people who want to take an active role in running their organisations.
• build vibrant democratic communities, by running citizen education courses to help people learn new ways of connecting with and representing their communities, looking into and presenting local issues and being heard at local and national government levels.
• understand the past and the present, and shape the future, by holding gatherings of participants from CTDU's member groups to network, to learn more about history, cultures and present day experiences and to develop confidence and capacity to work for change.

With a network of 45+ organisations that we work and communicate with regularly and projects funded until 2005, CTDU is well placed to develop further. CTDU's assets include an established, skilled and competent team of two training and development workers, a resource and information administrator, and a partnership management committee of representatives of committed voluntary and community groups. A high priority is placed on sound work management and financial systems.

WHAT DOES CTDU HAVE TO OFFER?

CTDU prides itself on particular skills in four areas:

Education and training for participation
CTDU works with representatives of both geographical communities and communities of interest, putting together educational and training opportunities to increase knowledge, confidence and skills for community involvement.

Cultural activities to develop voice
CTDU uses many cultural media to make learning enjoyable and creative, and also as an alternative means of getting local voices heard, expressing local views and building awareness of cultures which are hidden, ignored or undervalued. We have made banners, sculptures, sung, danced, and recited poetry at ceilidhs, we are going to put people's personal stories on the Internet, and we have studied local history on local hill-walks. We have studied poverty, its symptoms and root causes by attending films.

Making education fun, rewarding, sociable and relevant
CTDU has a great deal of experience and skill in working in voluntary/informal educational settings with people whose previous experience in the education system has been negative. We are good at coaxing people to join in, to try new things. We are constantly amazed and encouraged by the speed at which people can recover their confidence and develop their skills with some well-focused resources and a curriculum developed with the students around the issues concerning them. We believe in fun as a way of working because many communities have very hard lives and need, most of all, more joy in their lives in order to approach problems with a positive attitude.

A community development approach
Poverty isolates people. Not many of us today feel part of a community where we live. People thrive when they feel they belong somewhere, when they are valued, needed and have new experiences to let them grow. While it is important to focus resources on communities experiencing inequalities, it is important to be outward looking and promote integration with the wider community and to network with people from similar areas elsewhere in the Forth Valley. People need to get out more! There is great value in regularly taking people out of their own area to meet and network with members of communities elsewhere so that they can trade ideas and encourage one another. Our recent work with 'hard to reach' communities has also taught us the importance and the benefit of networking with people who are very different from us to reduce exclusion, intolerance and racism.

DEVELOPING POWER?
CTDU believes that current policy initiatives may be undermined by a lack of attention to educational means by which communities can develop their power. Power which is given, shared, which is legislated for, can be taken back. Power to come to the table as an equal partner with representatives of large institutions like health boards and local authorities needs to be developed in the form of knowledge and confidence, community leadership skills, and grassroots representative organisations. Communities can and do develop power in the partnerships we have, for people learn by doing, but not in sufficient strength to fulfil their potential and make a real difference to struggling communities. What we too often end up with is a few willing community members, who are invited to events to give the community's view without necessarily support from that community to feel confident and strong in their role. CTDU believes in education as a systematic and deliberate process by which communities can study together the causes of a community's problems and together propose, implement and evaluate initiatives to tackle problems. That process generates community participation and community capacity.

To the future …

In the next three years, CTDU seeks to build on the experience of our recent projects by:

• Providing education and training which connects with the realities of ordinary people's lives.
  
  
• Offering intensive study courses - rather than one-off study days - which build knowledge, skills and confidence, with clear targets of achievement and progression routes.
  
  
• Bringing together groups of students from across the Forth Valley to encourage a broadening of horizons, networking and collaboration, and to generate energy.
  
  
• Involving the students in the organisation, planning and delivery of the programmes.
  
  
• Raising awareness of different experiences of citizenship in Scotland and the need to address exclusion, prejudice and racism.
  
  
• Exploring the root causes of poverty in Scotland and its relationship with poverty elsewhere in the world.
  
  
• ·Developing voice and awareness of difference through a range of cultural media.
  

Political participation - developing in students the capacity, confidence and interest to engage with political decision making processes at community, district, national and international levels. The ability to pose one's own questions and frame one's own problems and solutions.

Social participation - helping students to engage effectively with others and with their communities. Communication skills of active listening, taking part in discussions assertively and with respect for others' views and experiences. Community leadership skills of team work, hosting and speaking in meetings, recording and reporting back discussions, having a range of methods to gather communities' views.

Cultural participation - building an awareness of and confidence in one's own cultural roots, and knowledge and respect for other cultural traditions in Scotland. Using the arts to raise and debate public issues in innovative ways, to develop voice, to express political critique and to build community cohesion.

Economic participation - vocational training with a social purpose. Literacy, numeracy, and ICT skills developed through research about local/social issues. Analysing statistics and observing how these are used in policy-making and the allocation of resources. Learning from people and organisations on the other side of the world through the Internet.

Core Funding and Generated Income
CTDU receives core funding of £9724 from Falkirk Council and £4930 from Clackmannanshire Council to support and promote effective community participation and active citizenship imperatives of the Councils and the Scottish Executive in partnership with local statutory and voluntary agencies. Key objectives relate to Social Inclusion policies:

Individual/community capacity building
Active citizenship
Effective decentralisation
Support of specific communities of interest

In addition to Council funding, CTDU undertakes capacity building training and other development work, which is paid for by statutory and voluntary organisations.

Equality Matters

(Supported by the Falkirk Community Planning Partnership)

Key Ideas

• facilitating a learning network for community activists and volunteers from priority areas
  
  
• delivering a development programme to enable new community leaders to emerge, strengthen the voice of communities to influence policy making and service delivery and raise awareness locally of a range of equality issues
  
  
• broadening participants' horizons by introducing them to the CTDU student association and involving them in a range of arts based media and environmental work to campaign against poverty and equality locally, nationally and globally.
  

The Equality Matters Project

Is a three-year project aimed at encouraging and enabling more people from marginalised communities to be involved in community organising and campaigning. It is designed to help communities develop an autonomous voice to communicate with their members and represent them, participate effectively in community planning structures, make presentations, deliver equality training programmes, and run campaigns. The project will:

• strengthen grassroots organisations
• develop participants skills for collective action
• increase the presentation skills, media skills and resources available to communities to present themselves positively
• improve the image and assertiveness of marginalised communities
• enable participants to think critically and creatively about the roots of inequality
• increase participants knowledge of and access to equalities legislation
• increase networking and collaboration across the equalities spectrum.

Why we have decided to do this work
Adults living in poverty, disabled people, people with a learning disability, people with a history of mental health problems, the LGBT community and black and minority ethnic communities should be in the forefront of efforts to improve services, promote inclusion and campaign against inequality. The reality, however, is that a life history of being shut out, of being told there is something wrong with you, something lacking in you and people like you, silences and isolates many people and leaves them without the resources and personal and community confidence, skills and knowledge they need to come forward, speak up and be heard. This quote refers to disabled people but is relevant for other marginalised communities too:

Cultural invasion leads many disabled people to a silent world of passive acceptance where they adapt to the status quo of a governmental system devoted to their 'welfare' rather than achieve an integrated positive identity from their own lived experience.
Peters S. (1999)

This project will contribute positively to community planning initiatives in local councils and health authorities and will provide intensive support to community activists from communities who face considerable barriers to participation, such as disabled people.

More and more recently, organisations have been asking CTDU to run short capacity building courses to enable community members to participate in community planning. This project idea has come out of our experience of offering such courses, recognising that the journey from silence to voice is a longer and more complex one than can be covered in a short skills training course.

The aims of the Equality Matters project are:

1st year focus
Establishing baseline information, forming a detailed delivery plan, establishing and delivering the learning network and the Equality Matters development programme.

CTDU will conduct an initial investigation in the Falkirk Priority areas to make connections with new communities and hear about their issues. We want to reach out to communities where there is currently little community activity or few supports for community activity to identify potential meeting places, any established organisations and community activists, to tell people about CTDU and make a plan as to how to make our services available to people there. We will compile a report which will include specific service delivery proposals to discuss with the Community Regeneration Team, DARA, the Capacity Building Team, the Community Planning Team and CVS Falkirk. CTDU will work collaboratively with other members of the Falkirk Training Consortium to ensure that capacity building support for priority areas is coordinated and comprehensive.

2nd year focus
Strengthening local organisations, supporting active involvement of participants in community organisations, in community planning partnerships, and in making presentations for their own communities, for the learning network and for services.

3rd year focus
Reducing education and training support to communities, concentrating on assisting organisations, including the learning network, to apply for funding.

1. A learning network

We will establish a learning network with regular events which will vary in style, venue, day of the week and time to maximise participation. The purpose of the network will be to enhance the role of community activists and volunteers in delivering social policies, to create a forum for exchanging information, ideas, learning and good practice, to establish e-networking opportunities and to enable communities to collaborate and strengthen their voice. Additional support will be offered to encourage and assist disabled people and people with a learning disability to participate in the network so that participants increase their awareness of a wide range of equality issues.

2. What the development programme will look like

We will meet small numbers of volunteers and activists through our initial investigation who we will offer our Equality Matters Programme to with the initial aim of supporting and encouraging their work and helping them attract more people to join them in their community endeavours. The programme we deliver will be designed in dialogue with participants to suit their needs and interests but is likely to include the following topics:

• Poverty and inequality in Scotland
• The image and self esteem of disadvantaged communities
• Community development, community regeneration and community planning
• Skills for community organising
• Skills for participation in community planning
• Getting heard as a community - using the arts to raise your profile and take control of your public image
• Community dialogue processes
• Participatory Action Research and reading statistics
• Presentation and group facilitator skills
• Conflict resolution
• Fundraising
• Campaigning

3. Broadening Horizons

We will seek to involve participants in other CTDU projects with other members of our student association at the Bothkennar Centre for Citizen Education and to deliver programmes on local and global citizenship, environmental awareness and action in Falkirk Priority Areas.

If you want to know more, please phone Iyaah Warren at CTDU, or email: iyaah@.ctdu.org.uk.

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• removing barriers to community action and volunteering
• encouraging and supporting grassroots ideas and initiatives
• enhancing skills, knowledge and confidence
• one to one and small group support

Fiona McKeown is the Volunteers' Mentor. To find out more, please phone or email Fiona

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Up for IT ;-)
April 2005 - April 2008

Funded by the Lloyds TSB Foundation for Scotland

Key themes:

E-networking
We have a three year grant from Lloyds TSB which started in April 2005 to develop a CTDU student association portal website. Our Information Communication Technology & Resources Development Worker will support participants to write up their personal stories about poverty and social exclusion and teach them how to upload their own contributions to the website. She will teach participants how to use the website, develop links with other volunteers and community activists, local/national/international organisations and encourage them to use other community ICT facilities and expertise.

Key Ideas

• develop and promote a CTDU student association portal website

• enable CTDU to integrate ICT skills and training into our programmes