Working together for empowerment in a rural town

It has scored many notable successes - and has also demonstrated the headway that can be made on local empowerment when town councils work with and through the Voluntary and Community Sector.

Working together for empowerment in a rural town

For more than a decade, the Lyme Regis Development Trust has been galvanising local people to get involved in campaigning for community projects and improvements.  It has scored many notable successes - and has also demonstrated the headway that can be made on local empowerment when town councils work with and through the Voluntary and Community Sector.

A caped Meryl Streep on the Cobb harbour wall remains, for many, the defining image of Lyme; scenic and wildly romantic. Indeed, it is a highly desirable place to live and attracts up to 20,000 visitors every weekend in the peak holiday season.  But the historical fiction of ‘The French Lieutenant's Woman' cloaks some gritty contemporary realities affecting the Dorset port; child poverty, seasonal work, low pay, expensive housing.  While demonstrating the progress that can be made on these issues, the Trust's experiences also highlight the frustrations people can face in trying to navigate through the complex maze of current planning regimes - and show how empowerment can be compromised by outside agencies.

Background

To understand the need for the Lyme Regis Development Trust and the work it has done, you need to understand a little about the place.

Lyme Regis sits on the Dorset and Devon border; a fishing port with 3,700 residents, it is also the gateway town to the 95 mile ‘Jurassic Coast' World Heritage Site and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

As such, in common with many other coastal towns in the South West, Lyme depends heavily on tourism. There are few year-round employers and career choices are limited. Wages are low - 17% below the national average; house prices are high - currently 40% above the national average. Almost a third of the houses in the town are now second homes or holiday homes.

The lack of affordable housing and job opportunities means young adults often have to move away to begin their independent lives. Nearly 45% of the population are over 60 (against 29% for Dorset as a whole), while an Index of Deprivation in the county in 2000 revealed that Lyme Regis ranked among the worst wards for Child Poverty.

Lyme therefore reflects many of the concerns raised in the Rural White Paper in 2000, which recognised that many rural communities were going through difficult changes and steadily losing essential services, such as decent public transport links. The situation has altered little since that was published.

After decades when the main focus on poverty and social exclusion was within urban areas, it is now accepted that poverty is also a major problem for many people living in rural areas. The often attractive and affluent appearance of the countryside and coastline can mask the underlying difficulties - poverty is hidden within the statistics, which are based on mainly urban indicators.

Meanwhile, the cost of providing services in the countryside is higher than in big towns - yet it is estimated that just £1.00 per head is spent on service provision for people in rural areas, against £1.60 per head in urban areas.

A lack of services means fewer opportunities for people to meet up and connect with their community, network and share experiences. This, in turn, also increases the need for good and accessible public information and advice.

Case Study Detail

Lyme Regis itself doesn't have a long history of community development or investment in the infrastructure of the Voluntary and Community Sector. Its location, sitting on the edge of the county boundary and bordered by the sea, has left it a little isolated.

However, people in the town say it is now buzzing with community activity - and the main driving force for this is the Lyme Regis Development Trust, an independent charitable company set up in 1998 to promote community consultation, planning and project delivery and act as a broker between local people and the authorities.

Since then, the Trust has organised many rounds of consultation with great success. One recent event attracted over 200 people.

But it hasn't secured this level of support simply by talking about things - it makes sure action is taken. There's more detail on this below - suffice it to say here that over the last 10 years the Trust has brought or mobilised over £895,000 into Lyme Regis for community projects. As one local person put it: ‘The Development Trust is the only mechanism to link with the community's aspirations...'

However, the Trust might have struggled to achieve as much without another vital ingredient - the involvement and support of the Lyme Regis Town Council and its elected members, who have backed many of the Trust's initiatives.

The two organisations work closely together on the Council's ‘Community Participation Initiative'. They arrange regular public meetings to consult directly on issues such as traffic and housing, which have in turn had a positive effect on people's perceptions of the council and what's going on in the town. In a sense, the Trust provides the Council with ‘forward-looking radar' - it is constantly mapping the issues which local people believe important and identifying possible solutions. It is a mutually beneficial relationship - with its ability to mobilise people and get them involved, the Trust offers a kind of ‘participatory democracy' working alongside the Council's ‘representational democracy'. And it is a complementary relationship when it comes to developing the projects which emerge from the consultation process; each has access to different lobbying and funding avenues.

The Trust produced a community plan, ‘Lymeforward' - which was subsequently formally adopted as the official strategy for the development of the town. As a result, the Development Trust feels it has the authority, knowledge and evidence to support activity, influence policy and to some degree influence the allocation of funding.

This community plan has helped shape the wider plan for West Dorset and the County Plan. That ensures that the people of Lyme have had some say in, and influence on, the priorities of the Dorset Strategic Partnership, including the need for affordable homes, better transport links and access to services, and environmental safeguards.

The local authorities' consultations are concerned broadly with the immediate future - but the Development Trust has also given Lyme people a voice in how infrastructure and services may be developed decades hence, by feeding their views into the strategic consultations held under the Coastal and Market Towns Initiative.

Lyme Regis Development Trust meets its staff and running costs through a variety of streams including a grant from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation which has allowed the Trust to focus heavily on its asset-based development plans. It also receives funding from the Town, District and County Councils to facilitate the community consultation and planning process, and rental income from local businesses based in its headquarters.

The Trust is run by Development Manager Marcus Dixon, who has a background in Information Technology. He strongly believes that community members can make a difference, and take empowerment forward in Lyme Regis.

It also has a part-time Local Area Partnership Co-ordinator, Ellen Rooke. Hers is a community development role; bringing people together and ensuring they feel able to get involved, and acting as link between the various committees and initiatives. This has been an essential element in encouraging the wider community to take part.

The Trust is further supported by a number of highly skilled volunteers, some of whom are retired. One, for example, has strong project management skills and has developed a relational database to store information on all of the projects, giving the Trust an overview of the progress of each one.

Results

One of the Development Trust's great successes was the acquisition of the St.Michael's Business Centre three years ago, buying out West Dorset District Council's interest in the former school building. The Trust regards this ‘community anchor' as a vital component in local engagement; a physical manifestation of commitment. It provides the Trust with a base and a ‘drop in' resource centre for meetings and the provision of advice and information, while rents from business units in the building help pay the Trust's bills, fund community activities and subsidise some community groups.

It has also become a community learning centre. By accessing Government funding for lifelong learning, the Development Trust was able to help establish LYMENET, which offers IT facilities and training for all, whether organisations, young people still at school, those wanting to gain recognised qualifications, or people who just want to learn to surf the net. It is fully equipped with computers, laser printers and digital multimedia hardware and is run by experienced staff. Originally, LYMENET received considerable assistance towards running costs, but the Trust must now generate income to support it.

The Development Trust regards one element as essential to sustained local engagement; what it calls ‘quick wins'. People identify an issue that they would like to see tackled; the Trust then uses its skills, knowledge, influence and contacts to access the resources and permissions required to achieve it. That reinforces the fact that the delivery comes direct from the consultation process, rather than being imposed ‘from above'; a payback for the community for getting involved in the process.

A prime example of this is the Young Person's Café ‘InSPARation'.

After talking with young people about their needs and wishes, the Development Trust sought the resources to back their plans. The Regional Development Agency and others provided the money to open the Café in 2004. The young people themselves help manage and run it; the cafe now offers services and advice to those aged 13-25 in Lyme and the surrounding area and acts as a platform for outreach activities in the town.

That has led to young people playing a much greater role in their community generally; meeting with the local MP, helping to set up a Youth Forum and contributing to West Dorset Youth Bank and Youth Council. They've also been actively involved in the drafting and production of the community plan.

The Trust's other achievements have included the establishment of an Under 12's Forum - which has led to the building of a new children's centre in the town - and obtaining funding from ‘Living Spaces' to improve the Mill Path across the river. ‘Turn Lyme Green', the latest initiative supported by the Trust, assists environmental sustainability by making Lyme a plastic bag-free zone, replacing them with ‘green' shopping bags produced by the Town Council and sponsored by a local holiday company.

Conclusion

There's no great secret to the Lyme Regis Development Trust's ability to engage local people; experience has taught it some simple and straightforward truths about fostering and maintaining confidence in its desire to deliver on behalf of the community.

Meaningful consultation is essential and must be continual, not just a one-off exercise. But it must also be about issues that people feel they can influence and actually make a difference; empowerment is won by achieving things, not creating wish lists. Making sure there are some ‘quick wins' where they can take pride in making change is extremely important in promoting continued enthusiasm and involvement.

A ‘community anchor', in the form of a building and resource centre, provides (to coin a pun) a concrete statement of engagement and empowerment.

The presence of a community development worker is not a luxury, but has proved to be a vital component in bringing people together and getting them to collaborate on the issues that affect them. And all of the Trust's activities are led and run by people who live or work in the Lyme Regis area. That sense of ‘local ownership' helps motivate other people to get involved.

Until now, the Development Trust hasn't had the capacity to analyse the effectiveness of its work, other than through community feedback and the visible outcomes.

However, future projects emerging from the new community plan will all be assessed for:

• Reaction: What was the immediate impact of the project?
• Learning: What can the local area now do that it could not do before the project was delivered and how has its capacity increased?
• Development: How has this increased capacity been applied?
• Change: What is the longer-term effect or impact of the activity likely to be?

Despite its obvious successes, the Development Trust would be the last to claim that bringing about meaningful community empowerment is easy. Funding is a continuing headache. Trust members describe keeping the range of initiatives going as ‘a plate-spinning exercise'. LYMENET is a good example; while finding funding to set it up was relatively easy, covering the continuing running costs is ‘a nightmare'. Funding organisations are increasingly channelling their resources into urban areas where the target audiences are larger and easier to attract, offering a bigger ‘payback'. But if Lyme lost LYMENET, local people seeking life-long learning would face journeys of 30 miles to the nearest major town.

It often struggles to pass messages from the community up through the Byzantine layers of local government. Instead, the approach can be ‘top down' with instructions coming from the upper tiers of Strategic Partnerships which bear little relation to ‘grassroots' needs.

The views of the Trust reflect suspicions in the sector about the true commitment of some statutory agencies and Government departments to community engagement, involvement and empowerment. One Trust member said: ‘At present many people that I work with don't believe that local authorities, statutory bodies, regional or national government actually care what local communities think. They just consult and plan because they now have to tick the box along with other politically correct awareness issues such as disability and ethnicity.'

There is also the problem of clashing agendas; conflicts between local desires and the requirements of ‘outside' agencies. For instance, many young parents in Lyme wanted ‘wrap around' child day care provision so they could take full-time jobs and break out of the local poverty trap. The Development Trust campaigned for this and Sure Start offered £250,000 towards a new Children's Centre in the town. However, Sure Start wants to use the building to undertake initiatives governed by its national agenda - which means it is only available part-time for general child care. It is a step forward and an important resource, but the Trust now has to seek other ways of achieving the original aim of meeting the needs of those young parents. In these situations, the fear is that those people who put time and effort into getting the centre up and running will feel ‘let down'.

As one member of the Under 12's Forum said: ‘You only get real empowerment if you give real powers. Those who have power have to devolve these powers. Local people have to have the resources and they have to have the power to set their own agendas.'

Do's And Don'ts

DO: handle community consultation, planning, capacity building and project delivery concurrently, not sequentially. People need to see a constantly evolving process of progress being made, of delivery on the consultation, or they are likely to become disenchanted.

DON'T: allow an adversarial relationship to develop with councils - the involvement and support of elected members, whether at Town, District or County level helps to take the community agenda forward.

You can read more about the empowerment in rural areas in the South West in Engagement and Empowerment Report 5 - Rural Areas.  You will find this in the Empowering Communities Reports section of our Empowering Communities downloads.