Sense of place toolkit
From Norfolk RCC
This toolkit is built around a selection of online resources aimed at producing a community action plan for protecting and enhancing your environment
You can follow the steps which show you how to organise, consult, assess what you have in your Parish or village and draw up an action plan.
If you're not ready for that, you can just dip into all sorts of interesting stuff that will help you to:
- find out more about the landscape and environment where you live and why it is the way it is.
- map out all of the natural and aesthetic resources that are recognised locally, nationally and internationally.
- get your community involved in protecting and enhancing the places and spaces they value.
- understand some of the challenges it is facing.
- develop an effective action plan to get things done and find funding.
Four simple steps
Each step is designed to give you the tools that will enable you to discover, share, engage and encourage members of your community to get involved in managing the future of their environment. Click on the steps to take a look or use the sky blue navigation panel on the left.
- Tell people what you're up to
- Get help
- Form a Steering Group
- Explore the options for recording, communicating and sharing information
- Learn how to develop your own community map
Step 2: Get to know your place
- Familiarise yourself with the online map search tools
- Find out what's on your own doorstep and get a feel for why these places are important
- Engage your community in finding places that they value and why they value them
- Pull all of the threads together
Step 3: Identify issues and opportunities
- Investigate issues and threats in more depth
- Research and discuss options for doing something to protect and enhance value
- Agree a realistic community strategy to achieve objectives
- Draw up a report on: what's on your doorstep; why it's important; the issues and threats that these places face; community actions to protect and enhance.
- Summarise actions as a plan
- Publish and ACT ON THE PLAN and set a timetable to revise the report and plan
About this project
The Sense of Place toolkit is designed to help those who care about their community and their natural environment.
Norfolk Rural Community Council works with communities across Norfolk, giving advice and support to Parish Councils, Village Hall committees and voluntary groups on a wide range of subjects and projects. Part of our work concerns Parish Plans and Village Design Statements and it became apparent that there was no similar process to enable communities or groups to look at their natural environment. There was a great deal of advice and information "out there" but nowhere where it could be found in one place, alongside advice about how to organise a group or project. So the Sense of Place toolkit was born.
Norfolk Rural Community Council received funding for the project from the Rural Social and Community Programme and the Sustainable Development Fund within the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The contract to put the toolkit together was awarded to the University of East Anglia, School of Environmental Sciences. This is the first time, as far ase are aware, that information, processes and techniques have been collected in one place. We hope that it will provide help and guidance to communities, groups and individuals wishing to undertake environmental projects or investigate the natural world. It is a free resource for communities wishing to use it. Please contact Norfolk Rural Community Council for further advice and support. The copyright for the toolkit belongs to Norfolk Rural Community. Statutory authorities and other non-community users, please contact NRCC.