Annual Updates

We’ve had a busy 2024 working alongside brilliant people, partners and communities to support positive change. Because so much of what we do as Community Development practitioners is based around supporting ‘change’, we’ve adopted the word as a running theme for this update. In particular, we’ve chosen to focus on:

• Celebrating community change
• Harnessing learning from and for change
• Activating knowledge and passion to deliver change
• Listening to lived experiences to inform change
• Bringing together people and communities to drive change
• Empowering the sector to make positive change

We see communities as changemakers and value lived experience as a route to understand the need for change and as a tool for influencing decision makers. While sharing people’s stories cuts across much of our work, throughout 2024 this has been a central focus for us. We have continued to work in a consortium led by Ipsos supporting the Covid-19 Inquiry’s Listening Exercise, hearing and recording the experience of many of those effected by the pandemic.

We continue to be proud of how well our community development training courses are received and we continue to offer bespoke training courses into 2025, so do speak to us if your organisation could benefit. A bespoke approach to training allows us to facilitate a more targeted approach, with organisations and groups able to choose their own focus to work towards goals they specifically want to achieve. We are also offering one to one or small group coaching in all things community development and community engagement to build on this offer.