In a special guest blog for Arsyllfa, Victoria Bancroft from Severn Wye discusses the Rural Futures project which funded 14 community regeneration schemes across Wales and what the project taught her and her colleagues about the steps needed to get to grips with rural challenges.
Despite being blessed with stunning locations, many rural communities experience often hidden hardships. They can be geographically isolated or otherwise excluded – from provision of services, decent public transport links, or local well-paid employment.
But communities can be powerful, and with some support can bring about lasting change for themselves.
I’ve seen for myself the power of small-scale, grassroots actions, through my part in Rural Futures, a seven-year programme funded by The National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF) and delivered by climate-action charity Severn Wye Energy Agency.
We supported 14 rural Welsh communities to devise home-grown projects that directly addressed their needs. The goal was not to parachute in with solutions but to empower local groups to identify and build on their existing skills and capacity to tackle the issues that matter most to them.
Another, crucial, goal was to communicate our experience to policymakers so future rural policies could be informed by evidence of what works and what doesn’t on the ground.
Facing up to challenges
Working with community groups is rarely smooth sailing. It’s fair to say that success for the programme, and the communities, relied on the skills of what we called ‘place coordinators’ – Severn Wye colleagues embedded in their local communities who built the trust over time that was critical to get things off the ground and keep momentum going through high points and low. They had to be skilled communicators who could engage authentically with their groups but also know how to access the routes to feeding into policy at regional and national levels.
They worked with community groups to identify the assets they could build on – be it a village hall, history and heritage, or local skills and knowledge – and to identify and prioritise the issues they wanted to tackle. They worked alongside as projects were devised, developed, and nurtured into effective bids for funding – for up to £140,000 from TNLCF (The National Lottery Community Fund) for each project.
Recipes for success
What does it take to succeed as a place coordinator on the ground? It takes time – to find the movers and shakers, to make sure the process is inclusive and has momentum while making sure that people can be heard. And it takes the resilience and impartiality to be able to help groups weather setbacks, acknowledge frustrations when things take longer than hoped, and be the golden thread when key people move on and the group needs to find its feet again.
But when that all comes together, when communities find their voice, start to understand their potential and have the confidence to take action – that’s when the magic happens.
From fruits to looms
As the programme evolved the material benefits became clear. Wider social and digital inclusion, access to training, and better employment prospects. Projects included building or refurbishing community hubs to host activities, creating opportunities for lifelong learning, and provide a space for previously unavailable services to be delivered locally.
Concerns about food security and cost led the community of Llandysul, Ceredigion, to create a new CIC, Yr Ardd (The Garden) to provide low-cost food for local residents. The space also hosted a year-round programme of training and volunteering opportunities and provided a venue for young people to learn about food growing, offering vocational and social reasons to stay in the area.
Residents of Pentredŵr, Denbighshire, highlighted rural isolation as their priority issue and wanted to support Welsh upland sheep farms. They developed a community hub as a base to help farmers explore innovative uses for low-value upland fleeces – such as matting at farm gates, tree guards and underlay for stone paths. And the community came together to learn wool-based skills including weaving, spinning and felting and generate additional income through craft sales.
Another group in Bro Machno researched the reasons behind the debilitating lack of affordable local housing, and took their findings to the Senedd. We saw many projects fund new roles, for example for activity coordinators, and in all Rural Futures created 13 new jobs. And when their schemes relied on further funding to reach their goals, the groups had the confidence to submit fresh bids to other sources, together leveraging more than £500,000 of additional funding to realise their plans.
Rigorous oversight
Rural Futures was guided by an Expert Advisory Panel, created to support and provide robust, constructive challenge to the programme management team, as well as to champion the work and disseminate learning to key organisations across Wales.
Professor Paul Milbourne of the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University was enlisted to provide expertise on the wider context of poverty in rural Wales. Professor Milbourne contributed learning from previous work similar to Rural Futures and provided academic rigour to the work that was undertaken.
Social and economic consultancy Wavehill provided an external evaluation to ensure the programme was delivered to the highest standards and assess whether it reached its outcomes. Wavehill provided an annual evaluation of progress, culminating in a final report assessing the overall effectiveness of the programme.
A legacy of change
We won’t fully understand what Rural Futures has achieved for some time, and we’ll need to do more evaluation some years down the track. But already the programme has clearly shown that community-led responses have a critical role to play as part of any anti-poverty and rural development policies in Wales.
Top-down approaches can’t account for local priorities and assets or build the skills and capacity communities need to forge their own future. Each Rural Futures project achieved its goals despite facing the challenges of austerity, Covid-19, Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis. The people who took part said the approach had transformed their community, provided a lifeline and brought people together to give their community a heart again.
Pointing the way forward
In our final report, we recommended that the relationship between communities, the voluntary sector, local government and the Welsh Government should change, so communities are empowered to deliver small-scale, grassroots actions to address the broader and structural challenges they face.
We need longer-term, flexible funding, and solutions that are tailored to communities’ unique needs.
The challenge now is how well – or whether – top-down policy and funding can meet the needs of rural places, and how effectively national and local policymakers listen to and learn from the communities they aim to help.
Meanwhile, here on the ground, we’re thrilled to see that several of the communities who took part in Rural Futures have already started to plan further activities. And Severn Wye is recruiting more place coordinators to take ten more communities on a journey towards energy efficiency and renewable energy generation – as Cymunedau ynNi / Energised Communities. Below are some recommendations for policy makers in light of what we have learnt during the Rural Futures project.
Recommendations
- Funding must be long-term and flexible, while enabling communities to identify their own problems and solutions.
- The focus of funding needs to be on outcomes and not outputs.
- Having a network of skilled place coordinators to support communities is essential to help those who currently do not have the skills or resources to access grants.
- Securing the cooperation of external agencies and intermediaries (from local to national) should be done early on in the process.
- Support should be tailored to the needs of individual communities: a one-size-fits-all approach is not productive.
- Projects would benefit from longer entry and exit phases as part of a longer project in future, allowing more time to ensure suitability at the outset and tapering of support towards the end.
- Enhancing and promoting online resources and best practice and providing more resources for peer-to-peer networking will help consolidate success.
- There is a need for a ‘rural observatory’ – a mechanism that can inform policy and encourage the integration and sharing of innovative approaches to rural community development.
For more information on Rural Futures and for more details on each individual project follow this link to Severn Wye’s website. For information on our new project, Energised Communities, follow this link to find out more.
