An important milestone was recently marked as Bro360 marked its two-year anniversary. Seven areas – involving some 91,000 people – are part of the project, which aims to create community websites across Wales. The websites seen as key to helping bring communities together, along with boosting local activity and strengthening their resilience.
The seven websites represent areas and communities within Arfon and Ceredigion and share the latest news about their communities. They include:
Caernarfon360
DyffrynNantlle360
BroWyddfa360
Ogwen360
BroAber360
Clonc360
Caron360
The websites are part of an effort to see if they can form a national network of similar sites. In the few months before Covid, the websites proved their worth with live blogs, videos, photos and stories bringing events to life in a new way. Meanwhile, during the pandemic they managed to reach new audiences and fill gap in media provision through providing local stories.
Recently, the scheme has also nurtured young reporters and created a course giving aspiring reporters the confidence, ability, and desire to get out and tell stories that are important to their local communities. The scheme has also been successful in supporting Papurau Bro during the lockdown and have ran specific campaigns, such as supporting people to shop locally.
The vision of creating local stories for the community is extremely important to the project and it will be interesting to see how the scheme grows, as it develops websites for new areas while strengthening the use of the Welsh language and people’s awareness of their communities.
