Building our communities over the next 5 years

What are we going to do?

Exeter Community Forum and Exeter City Council  have committeed to support a team of Community builders for 5 years. We know that work with communities takes time. Our  commitment is designed to help build communities and plan for some of the changes we know are going to happen, for example the building of new housing developments. So over 5 years we’ll:

Learn!  Provide full training for the team of community builders and in the third year of the programme run the same training especially for volunteers who’d like to learn how to use community building approaches with their voluntary work in the community. Community builders  will meet up monthly in a peer learning network.

Act!   Work with local communities to deploy up to five full time equivalent community builders to work in specific geographical areas of the city. Their work will be supported by a team leader. A full time equivalent means that some, if not all, the roles will be part time in each area.

Prove!   Agree what difference we want to see in the communities that the Community Builders work and assess this impact annually.

Share!   Work with other organisations to help promote the work of Community Builders  and build a public database of community activity across the city so it’s easy for people to get involved in their community.

Reflect!   In the third year we’ll review how the programme is running and see if any changes are required to plan, where Community Builders are allocated and if any additional resources may be needed.

Celebrate! Hold an annual event for communities and community builders to see what progress we’re making and plan ahead.