Webinar on Community Engagement in High Streets Projects

Speakers: Jules Brown, Michael McBratney, Owain Lloyd-James, Hannah, Rachel

Owain: …on, high streets, historic high streets, developed as part of our Historic High Streets Heritage Action Zone programme. Over the preceding three weeks we have covered the need for historic high street regeneration, the history of shopfronts, and the repair and reinstatement of shopfronts.

Today for our final webinar we’ll be looking at community engagement in high street projects. As with previous weeks, I am providing the briefest of introductions to the hour. To those of you who have listened to each of the previous three, sorry that you have to listen to me again, but the pain will be short-lived before you get the pleasure of Michael and Jules.

I don’t think I need to repeat the value of this work and the importance that high streets have to us all, economically, socially and culturally. These are important spaces so it is vital that we support them to adapt to meet the changing needs of the communities they serve, change that has been accelerated by the pandemic.

Of course, it is that point about adapting to need that is so important in the context of this webinar because before you can adapt, you need to understand. That is why early, meaningful community engagement is so important in regeneration programmes like this.

In previous webinars, we have touched on the fact there is less demand for retail on our high streets and that there is a need for places to adapt to that but, and this is important, when we talk about issues like this, we are talking about national trends, but every place is different and the needs of communities are different.

High streets must adapt to meet those different local needs. Of course, what we can say is that more of us are shopping online. We have had to do this year and as a result, there is less need for people to visit high streets, therefore they have to become places where people want to visit, where people want to spend their leisure time. Whilst how they do that will vary from place to place, for all high streets, the quality of the environment, the character of the place will be key to making that happen. That is why programmes that target historic character like our High Streets Heritage Action Zones have an important role to play.

Now, just before I hand over to Michael and Jules, I would just like to mention the possibility of future webinars. This series has been designed to build on Historic England’s experience of using heritage to regenerate places. Whilst our programme will be working directly with 68 high streets, we hope that the learning we are developing in those places can be applied far more widely.

For these four webinars, we have selected topics where we feel we have a good story to tell. We feel our thinking can help shape the work of others, but thus far they have all been our ideas of what we feel others need.

I hope to be able to run a series like this in each of the four years of our programme and next year I hope that we will cover topics that others have told us will be useful. I shall shortly be putting my email address into the chat section. I would ask you, if there is something you think Historic England should be providing a high street-related webinar on, then please do let me know. I can then use those suggestions to shape future webinar series on historic high streets.

And with that, I’d like to pass you over to today’s illustrious speakers. They are Michael McBratney, our head of community development, who has been responsible for developing how the programme engages with local communities and Jules Brown, our historic places advisor for the North East and Yorkshire region, one of the brave souls that supports our High Streets Heritage Action Zones to convert Michael’s ideas into projects that make a difference to high streets and communities. And with that, I think I am right in saying that Michael will be opening up. Over to you, Michael.

Michael: Thanks very much, Owain. Thank you. Can you all hear me OK? I hope so. I’m going to assume that you can. I just wanted to say first of all welcome to everybody. Great numbers of you. I can see you all coming in. I can see Dudley, Sowerby Bridge, Wigan, Fleetwood, Ormskirk, Bedford, Gosport to name a few, so some good representation from across the High Streets project. It’s really great to see you all here. I wanted also to say thanks to all of the HE team that run the webinars for putting things together today, to Owain for his great leadership and all of the high streets team for managing a really big and exciting project, but especially to Jules for his participation in today’s webinar, but especially also to Rachel Lake who is our senior communities advisor for high streets and does all of the direct interfacing with projects and has corralled us all to get things together today, so big props to you all. Thank you very much for all your help and good leadership in all of this.

I did just want to run through quickly some objectives for today’s session. Really we want to give you an overview of community engagement for the High Streets Heritage Action Zone project. Given that it’s in its relative infancy, we wanted to draw upon Jules’ considerable expertise and experience in running similar regeneration projects in the North East that have followed a very similar regenerative community engagement model to that which we use for high streets. And then I wanted to come back in again to talk a little bit about how we have structured early engagement, particularly for the High Streets project during the design phase of the scheme. There is much engagement to be reported on and to be done over the course of the next few years but with the design phase largely complete for many projects, it is the first point at which we’re going to be able to evaluate the community engagement that’s taken place. But that will be forthcoming. So, there is a slightly prospective element to my content in today’s webinar but Jules’ stuff comes from tried and tested recipes in the North East that we’ll get on to.

So, that’s essentially how things are going to run for the session. There will be a Q&A at the end. I can see that there are many high streets projects here represented, so your questions, your examples, your shares of anything that’s helpful as we work through will be really helpful in discussion at the end. Please do share anything you’d like to in the chat.

I’m going to move on to the first bit of the actual show. Here we go. So, really, the High Streets Heritage Action Zone project is what I’m going to talk about specifically. As I’ve said, it’s very much in its infancy but we’re funding nearly 70 projects across all regions of the country to regenerate their historic high streets through a range of physical interventions and an ambitious cultural programme with community engagement a central element to all of those parts of the work taking place over the next three or four years.

I want to start fairly simply by thinking: Who are the communities that are stakeholders in our high streets?

It’s one of the questions that comes up whenever we talk about engagement. And for the High Streets project, the communities that we are seeking to engage are communities largely of place and interest, by that I mean those that live, learn, work, play, visit and use the high street in any way.

The local community are some of the most significant stakeholders for the project. They are the groups of people that will live, work and visit these places 10 years after the grant funding has ended, where legacy projects are [INAUDIBLE], and they are the ones that we want to continue to sustain that legacy for their high street. So, it’s really important that we engage them very early and equip them with the skills, knowledge and capacity and make use of those that they have already to be able to sustain the impact and legacy of the project in the long term.

By engagement we mean meaningful opportunities for those local communities to participate in as many areas of the scheme as possible and in all of its stages and phases, from the design phase, the actual delivery of the project and the ongoing legacy and in as many areas of the work as possible.

The main areas of work for the High Streets Heritage Action Zone project focus upon historic buildings, conservation and restoration, public realm improvements, shopfront improvements as you’ve learned about in the previous webinar series and an ambitious cultural programme. And really we want to encourage our grantees and partners to consider ways in which they can involve local communities in all areas of that as far as possible. There are some areas that are not so suitable for engagement, expert decision-making etc, but we do want them to make helpful and significant attempts to engage communities as far as possible in all of those areas. At every stage, not just as audiences and beneficiaries, but as leaders of the project, co-leaders, partners.

In terms of where we are with community engagement with the High Streets project at the moment, we have asked all schemes to produce a community engagement plan that will lay out how they will engage a diverse range of local communities in all areas and phases of the scheme. And those are being drafted at the moment with drafts being submitted to Rachel and myself and our regions’ teams for appraisals which we’ll respond to and agree a community engagement plan with each project that will run over the next three or four years. What that plan will demonstrate is how exactly the schemes will meet the principle community outcomes for the High Streets Heritage Action Zones project and I want to run through those before we hand over to Jules for an example of how similar kinds of regeneration projects have worked in the North East.

So, starting in the bottom left-hand corner there, we do want to make sure that communities are engaged in all phases and all areas of the project. We do want to make sure that heritage and other knowledge and skills is increased in local communities throughout the programme, crucially that space and services are secured for local communities on the high streets in the long term. We want to make sure that a broad range of diverse local community groups are engaged across project. We want to make sure that community and individual wellbeing is increased throughout the scheme. We want perceptions of the high street as a place to live, work and visit to have improved and we want to have built capacity in local community and third sector organisations so that they’re able to sustain legacy for the project, raise further funds, become more resilient, skilful and expert in themselves as organisations in matters of heritage-led regeneration. And significantly, also we want to make sure that local community groups and organisations, through that resilience and legacy, are able to contribute significantly to the local economy and its boost through the wider regeneration project.

We practice a particular kind of model for community engagement that Jules is going to speak about in a bit more detail in his presentation to follow, but to run through that quickly with you, we see community engagement not simply as light touch engagement with content that is produced as part of a scheme like this. There are several layers of the engagement that we encourage our partners to practice that goes from those early engagement and outreach opportunities that really provides opportunity for local community groups and members to participate over a period of time in the activities of the project, where they can learn skills, increase their wellbeing, reduce loneliness through associating and working with others, foster a spirit of partnership with community organisations and third sector organisations to work with us on these high streets in order that we empower them to become leaders of similar and legacy projects in the future. It’s a regenerative model that suits the nature of the scheme itself. It’s a long-term process to achieve as Jules is about to reveal. We’re at the very early stages of it with the High Streets project, but I’d like to hand over to Jules now to discuss how a similar kind of regenerative model has worked at Fish Quay in the North East. So, I’ll hand over to you, Jules, if I may.

Jules: Thank you, Michael. Good afternoon everybody. I’m Jules Brown. I’m one of the historic places advisors in the North East and Yorkshire region of Historic England and yes, I’m going to give one example for you to run through the model that Michael has introduced. But first I just wanted to run through a couple of slides to demonstrate why we should do this, why is this needed, why should we engage with communities. And at this point, I think it would be useful for you, if you wanted to, to pop your own thoughts on why we do this into the chat box so that we can understand what your perspectives are. From ours, here are just five bullet points. I could have put 50, probably, on the screen, if I’d had time and space. Here are five bullet points of why we think it’s important to engage communities, particularly for this on our High Streets programme, but more widely.
We see the historic environment as being part of a whole place, not just sites with historic fabric and character. So, engaging communities as part of that place is fundamental to investing in fabric and character as well.

Good place-shaping relies in part on local community identity and that is driven, obviously, by local people. So, if we want to shape a place appropriately, we need to understand how local people regard their identity. Local communities can help deliver activities and programmes and projects as well as being beneficiaries and audiences. And I think that’s an important thing to bear in mind throughout all of this, that this isn’t work being done to or even necessarily being done with the communities, it can just as much be work being done by the community. I think an important point to make is that the heritage and cultural sectors in England, in the UK generally, need more capacity and therefore local people can help provide that capacity. That’s going back really to the agendas of localism and the big society which were introduced 10 years ago or more now. The idea of volunteering as a public good.

And, in terms of the High Street programme, then we move on to kind of the really obvious stuff. We need communities to be able to stimulate capital investment. We need them to create demand on the high street, to deliver training, to spread understanding, to cultivate the community spirit and pride that Michael mentioned and to achieve all the wider socio-economic benefits. We know that people… Heritage Council, the research that we do, we know that people enjoy heritage. It does enrich people’s lives. It is a source of local pride and people demonstrably do care about the heritage and want to secure it, so there is great merit in being sincere and serious about community engagement in this kind of work.

So, it is also a formal, fundamental part of this which many of you will know, you will be aware of the heritage cycle. Thank you, by the way, for all those comments in the chat box. We’ll go through some of those later on and they’ll be a really good record. That’s great. “Raises aspirations” – I like that one. Anyway, heritage cycle, basic informed conservation theory that many of you will know about. Here is a depiction of the heritage cycle. If anybody can tell me why it has a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough in the middle of it… I have absolutely no idea. If you can tell me why, you win a pack of chocolate chip cookies.

So, we start really anywhere on the cycle but let’s start with “Understanding”. By people understanding the historic environment, they learn to value it and from valuing it they want to care for it, and by caring for it, they will enjoy it, and by enjoying it, there comes a thirst to understand it more. So, it’s a basic philosophy, if you like, that heritage generates its own value by the community engaging with it and that’s something which… Here we are: “The old adage of recipes being better with all the right ingredients”. OK. Yeah. That might be it. I like that. Anyway, that’s the heritage cycle. Always something good to have at the back of your mind.

So, here is the key slide. This is our community engagement model. This is the model that Historic England now is promoting across its High Streets Heritage Action Zone work. We’re also promoting it across other areas of our activity and we hope it will become more central, more pivotal to what we do. This again is a cycle. It’s not a ladder, if you like, but it is something which… All four levels of this will become important to the work that we do and the work that we fund. So I’m going to go through each of these four boxes. I won’t read out each of those ones now but I’ll leave it on there just for the moment while I introduce what I’m going to do. I’m going to go through each of those four boxes and highlight different components that you might want to deliver under each of those four boxes to engage with the community. And I’m going to do so using an example from one place in the North East which is the Fish Quay in North Shields. I had a quick scan of the list of attendees, I don’t know if there is anybody from North Tyneside Council or a community in North Tyneside here. If you are, declare yourselves in the chat box. If not, then we can get this PowerPoint to you later.

Before I joined Historic England, I worked for an organisation called the North of England Civic Trust, now called Cultura Trust, and we were lucky enough to have a long-term engagement with North Tyneside Council and the community in this particular conservation area. It’s a very hardworking, gritty conservation area on the riverside at the mouth of the Tyne, east of Newcastle in the North East, Tyne and Wear in North Tyneside Borough. It’s the medieval origin of North Shields, the town, and it’s a really exciting and striking conservation area to be in, full of grain and texture, full of rich character including sights, sounds, smells even, as a working fish quay. Some brilliant shopping and leisure opportunities, a great place to walk the dog and cycle and to buy wet fish. There’s good ecology and so on as well. It’s a really good place. If you have the chance to visit, I would encourage you to do so. I worked in Fish Quay on and off as a consultant from 2000 until about 2015 and I’m going to use examples of the work here to illustrate the four stages on our cycle. [INAUDIBLE] Correct, it is.

Right. So, Level 1 on our engagement bubble is “Engagement”. This is essentially the lowest level that you would hope to achieve. We describe it as organisations, i.e. you guys, organisations involve communities through events and outreach programmes to promote local opportunities. So, this is about involving people in promoting essentially. It’s about providing some support, reaching out to communities and having that first introductory level of engagement. It’s a relatively passive exercise but there should be some two-way element to it. It’s essentially a gateway to the rest of the programme.

It shouldn’t be the only level that you seek to go at. This is about local people enjoying, socialising, improving their wellbeing, but it must be sincere. It mustn’t just be tokenistic. It must be something which actually inspires an interest in the next level. It should trigger a desire to want to be involved in more.

The image is an example of one piece of work that might fall into this category and each of those is a newsletter that was produced as part of the activity that was going on in Fish Quay during those years. Each one of those folded out into a big sheet with a map and quizzes and stories and news and also opportunities to engage, to email back and so on. This is really in the days before heavy social media engagement. And so, this is an introductory level and it’s where you might find the traditional word that we have often used in this round which is “consultation”. What we’re talking today is way more than consultation, but consultation would essentially appear in here and it would be only one part of that. So, the bullet points there are some examples of the sort of activities which could be done in this level such as mapping where all the community stakeholders are, getting people to tell you who they are and where they are and what they are interested in. Community outreach campaigns, publicity for example, promotion and consultation, as I’ve said, and starting to do some baseline evaluation. If you are going to measure the impact that the funding that you’re spending will have on the community, you will want to start with a good baseline and communities can help gather that kind of background information.

So Level 1 is the introduction.

Level 2 is “Participation”. As it suggests, this is taking it up to a much more hands-on step. Community members and groups actively participate over time to learn cultural skills, to learn knowledge and to co-produce services and programmes. So this is about sharing, this is about us enabling them. This is an ongoing relationship. It’s not something which is bitty at the beginning. And it is about co-delivering, co-creating, doing it in collaboration with people. And this is now no longer passive at all, this is very much active. This is about welcoming local people into doing things with you. So this is recognising that local people have skills, they have experience and that there are assets in the community that can contribute to your goals. It’s about producing activity with communities, not just for. And it’s about improving community confidence and ability and at this level there are small projects that the community can do with you or even for you. For example, research, historic research, an element of training or joining working groups for example. So this is a much more collaborative approach. So the examples that I’ve shown there at Fish Quay, when I first joined working down at Fish Quay, this is 2001, in 2003 the conservation area was designated and it was at that point that the Fish Quay working group was created and that was led by the council but chaired by the trust that I worked for by me. And that became the focus of the activity going on down there. And two really important products grew from that, both repaired by the community and led by a professional facilitator but done entirely by the community. One was the blue document which was the character appraisal for the conservation area that had just been designated. It took about two or three years to do. It was quite a long process but at the time it was very innovative and it actually won a couple of awards for being a really good community-led public document that was eventually adopted by the council. And the second one was some design guidance, “Design Know-How” as it was called, which was essentially a large pamphlet, a newspaper sized pamphlet which again was adopted by the council to help inform development down in that part of North Shields. So the top image is an example of one of the workshops that was involved in “Design Know-How” and the middle image there is a workshop for the character appraisal where were being told in no uncertain terms what was happening in this place by the jolly fisherman who were part of the community there.

The next level is “Partnership” and this is, as you might imagine, a much weightier way forward. This is where community organisations work in partnership and they co-lead services and programmes. They don’t just join in, they start to lead, and this is where they build their organisational capacity to do. So, this is about having good representation, solid and formal representation from the community and using their own skills to enrich yours.

This is about building capacity and making sure that there is a measure of equality now between you and the community. The community should start to steer what is going on and have quite a strong influence over what is going on. So, yes, they have a steering role in design and delivery and Michael will talk more about that influence over the design side of it in a bit. And projects can now be constituted by the community, not just given to them, but they can actually start to constitute projects that can be representative of the community.

This is the community investing their own skills and starting to sustain the future of their own place, using your project as the medium. They should be equal influences and delivers as I’ve said. So, some examples of the sort of thing that they could do under this level would be training and mentoring. You provide training and mentoring to them in good governance and good leadership so that their skills to influence what’s going on in public life can be enhanced. You could recruit them to governing bodies and working groups and indeed the other way around, you can be recruited to their governing bodies and working groups. Building capacity to run a third sector or public body such as understanding how finance and funding works, business planning, fundraising, historic asset management and so on. And going back to the evaluation side of things, doing some good community impact monitoring.

So, here are three examples of this level in the Fish Quay. So the first one, the top one there is a screengrab from a website and that website was essentially a pretty good attempt at branding the conservation area. Now, Historic England produces quite a lot of information about place branding and we see it as quite an interesting and important opportunity for places that are hoping to bring new people to their place as part of its future, its economic future, be they local people or visitors from further afield. So place branding is quite an important deal and this was a really good example that was produced by the private sector and the council in Fish Quay during this period from about 2008 onwards for a few years. And it was quite an active website, you can see it had some really good photography and it started to generate quite a lot of interest. And that was delivered in partnership, essentially by the private sector down there and it worked very well. The problem with that was that as soon as some funding fell it stopped. The website is still there, but it hasn’t been updated for a good eight years I think. So, it’s a really good example but it hasn’t sustained itself. The other two examples there are much meatier.

Bottom right is the front cover of the Fish Quay Neighbourhood Plan. Now, if anybody knows anything about neighbourhood plans, please don’t switch off now. Stay with me, it’s an important example. The Fish Quay Neighbourhood Plan was indeed one of the first pilot neighbourhood plans in England. There were 17 and Fish Quay was chosen as one of them. And this was a project that was given to the community by the council. There was a great deal of trust given to the community to run this project, again chaired by a professional facilitator, me, and it ran for about three years I think, two and half years, producing a document that was eventually adopted by the council. It wasn’t actually adopted as a neighbourhood plan, it was one of the first pilots, it was adopted as a supplementary planning document. But that was a project done entirely in partnership to produce community-led influence over spatial planning development in their conservation area. A very meaty project. And the third one on the screen there is the fact that the community then formed a coastal community team which you will know is another area of government spending, the Coastal Communities Fund, which I think is still active, isn’t it? Yes, it is. There are coastal community teams all around the country and the North Shields one was formulated and was able to bid for funding. So at this level, it’s a much weightier engagement.

And the final level is the real pinnacle. This is one that we all want to aspire to. This is “Leadership”. This is where the community actually leads. Community-led ownership, governance, financing and business operation of heritage assets or services to sustain the legacy and impact of the investment that’s been going on in this place. So these are major projects. This is where the community governs, carries out its own operations and delivers the legacy that your project has inspired.

This is the highest level of trust, really, between public bodies and the community and it’s where the community get to decide, they get to “own”. So this is recognising that there is value in the communities leading entire projects, not just joining in yours. The community can take on assets, all services to develop their own cultural gains or cultural benefits, social benefits from them.

Communities are empowered to plan, lead, own, govern, fund and then sustain these assets or services and this is about building the capacity essentially to become self-sufficient, to become future resilient.

So, some of the things that will be relevant here would be things like creating charities or creating community interest companies or reusing existing charities and companies and being interested in community assets, physical assets in the community and how those might sustain the investment that your project is delivering. Looking ahead to implementing evaluation recommendations in the future, community development and forward planning, and then legacy planning such as fundraising and business modelling. And the example I’m going to finish on is this wonderful place at Fish Quay which is the Old Low Light. This was an empty and derelict lighthouse. It is a lighthouse although it doesn’t look like a traditional one but it is. An empty and derelict lighthouse in the conservation area which, as you can imagine, is one of the most important buildings down there both archaeologically and historically and had long been sort after as a heritage centre.

And of course, you know, the traditional response is “These things cost a lot of money” and “How are they going to operate?” and blah blah blah. And it took a great deal of time, energy and trust to eventually create a project whereby the local Building Preservation Trust which is Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust essentially took the building on from the council to rescue the building and meanwhile, the community created their own fully governed charitable company and used Coastal Communities Fund, quite a sizeable six-figure Coastal Communities Fund sum, to devise what would go on in the building. And over about five years, the physical capital works and the community development works combined to create the Old Low Light. And it is now this wonderful heritage and cultural venue down on the Fish Quay which is very successful although understandably at the minute not quite so. We hope that they recover well after COVID restrictions. And if you do get the opportunity to go there, do. It’s got a café, it’s got a permanent exhibition, it’s got a rotating exhibition, it’s got hireable space. It’s got wonderful outdoor spaces, a great balcony for some really striking views over the quay and the estuary. So, that’s a really good example I think of a project which was born out of trust between the community and the council essentially after 15 years’ worth of community engagement work that led to it from 2001 onwards. So those I think are good examples of, just from one place, of the different types of work that you can engagement with in our four level community engagement model. And at this point I’m going to hand back to Michael.

Michael: Thanks very much, Jules. Thank you for that inspiring case study and I think we all need to take home the example and to recognise that it is a long process, you know, 15 years start to finish I think, Jules, for Fish Quay to full community leadership. And I think that really drives home the importance of engaging communities effectively as early as possible during these kinds of regeneration projects. Post-funding, there are 10 years to go in Fish Quay to get towards the ownership of that particular asset. So, the necessity to build those skills and capacity to work in effective partnership with local community organisations is absolutely key and that won’t work in the project if communities don’t see that they’re being engaged in a mature and realistic and meaningful way from the outset of their scheme. So, what I did want to talk about for the next five minutes or so -I’m going to condense it just for the sake of time so that we have some decent Q&A time- is just to talk about the structure, about the way in which early engagement has been structured in the High Streets project.

But of course, I do want to also talk particularly about the impact of COVID on these early engagement opportunities because they have been significant and have been a knock to the confidence of projects and their capacity to be able to deliver the engagement that they planned and we can’t really have this discussion without mentioning the impact and response of COVID upon community engagement in the scheme.

You can see from Jules’ presentation and as you will all know from knowing about community assets and community development in your local areas, the stakes are really high for communities in these kinds of regeneration projects. This diagram is simply what’s at stake for local communities in their involvement at every stage of the High Streets project. I’m not going to go through them all. We don’t have time. We’ve covered quite a bit of it in Jules’ example. But for the design phase, I think ensuring that community organisations, representatives of them, can be involved in the governance of the project and that communities themselves can be involved in the co-creation of engagement activity and plans is really important. And that can be achieved through outreach workshops and opportunities for local communities to have their input and say on scheme designs from the earliest stage. And then there are other opportunities for those other levels of participation to really come good in the delivery phase and the legacy phase and you can see in the language that we’re using there, it chimes very much with the way we’ve described the four stages of our regenerative model. Regenerative is important, not just because it’s about historic regeneration, but really what we’re trying to do is build that capacity within local communities so that they can run the cycle themselves to start again and it continuous in a sort of virtuous spiral.

In terms… Just to revisit quickly the main areas of work in the High Streets project, to bring you back into the context of the High Streets Heritage Action Zones scheme, these are the main areas of physical intervention and work on the schemes. There are listed there many ways in which communities can participate, learn skills, partner and co-lead different elements of the programme. The stakes and the opportunities are high for them. To come particularly to engagement during the design phase, we really wanted to encourage schemes to be open to allowing community organisations and their representative to play a lead role as far as possible and where possible in the governance of the project. And that may take various forms across the High Streets project. T

wo of our projects are community-led, in Tyldesley in the North West and in Hastings in the South East. They’re not run by local authorities so they’re quite interesting examples themselves of full community leadership of these schemes from the get-go and there will be really interesting results that come out in our evaluation of those schemes as will come from the local authority ones as well.

Most of our projects are local authority-led and what we see across the schemes are different ways and levels in which community groups and organisations are involved in the governance of the project, sometimes sitting on the main board and steering group of the whole project, sometimes participating in working groups that are specifically around community or cultural engagement or sometimes in a dedicated community stakeholder group who can act as a community panel to be consulted on different and discrete areas of the project. For example, Chatham’s High Streets Heritage Action Zone plan on having four different community steering groups that align with four years of their delivery that feed up to the project board and down to co-design and project delivery with communities themselves. Bacup, in the North West, their High Streets Heritage Action Zone partnership board is a third made up of community organisations so it gives you a sense of some of the variety of ways in which governance and community participation in that is structured across the projects.

Another thing that we’ve been really keen to support projects to do and have seen many of them doing is really making sure that their plans for community engagement, that their objectives, the communities that they want to work with, the local priorities and themes for their engagement align with existing community strategies and priorities. Those might be, for example, joint strategic needs assessments for a local authority, there might be data and information that’s come from community consultation in local town plans in prior regeneration schemes, various kinds of townscape regeneration initiative and other arts heritage and cultural projects in which community participation has been key. Bringing in data from those schemes has been really helpful and avoided what can become consultation fatigue with communities and is a risky thing where recent local projects have identified many of these priorities with local communities and can be responded to. It really creates a kind of fluency and continuity in regeneration projects where several years of that 15 year journey towards community leadership and ownership of assets may have begun in five years of prior funded, culture sector-funded project, for example. We want to encourage projects to make use of that existing community data when it exists and it aligns with those local priorities.

Consultation and workshops, as outlined by Jules in his session there, clearly a really vital part of the engagement element. That early stage consultation with local communities can be quite light touch at times, can be quite sincere and participatory, but really between August and September, we’ve encouraged schemes to run workshops and consultations to share ideas for their regeneration projects and field community ideas and input to them that went into their design phase.

Also to that last point, co-design and co-creation, it should be noted that given the impacts of COVID, the design phase for the High Streets project has necessarily extended as revisions have been needed across different areas of the scheme, but also revisions for community engagement in particular in light of the impacts of COVID that I’ll spend the last few minutes of my presentation on. But that does mean that the plans are currently being produced, that the design phase continues and that there is opportunity for schemes to really support local communities to have their say in the kinds of activities that they would like to run. We’ve seen with Tyldesley, for example, they did a Facebook callout which had nearly 400 views that was really keen to field suggestions and ideas from the local community about what the community engagement activities should be. And they’ve chosen six activities and sub-programmes that have been suggested by their local community that they will run as part of the project. So, there are some of these key ways that projects can engage with communities effectively right from the get-go in their projects.

As I’ve said on a couple of occasions, the project is in its infancy. So, we will see these engagement initiatives really come to fruition and be reported on over the next six months. We are just in the process of appointing an external evaluator for the community and cultural elements of the programme and really the extent and depth of design phase engagement will be one of the earliest bounded areas of engagement that we’ll be able to report on as a discrete area. So we expect and hope to produce results to be shared with all of you in due course about the successes during that phase.

We’ll skip on quickly to the impacts of COVID because really the community engagement process, all of that co-creation, the process of appointing board members, the consultations and workshops are an ongoing process and will remain so throughout the lifetime of the project. But we were hit by COVID as we were just gearing up to run those early consultation events, co-creation activities and workshops. COVID has had a significant impact on all of our lives and the capacity of our partners and grantees to take forward their projects for all manner of reasons but it’s obviously had a significant impact on any face-to-face engagement activity that had been planned by any of the schemes.

We had to respond quite quickly to this. We were in a very fortunate position where we were not only able to maintain our levels of funding for the entire programme but actually increase them and to continue to run even in the teeth of COVID but we did have to change and support schemes to adapt their engagement to this new context.

So, some of the main ways that we have done that are to encourage their use of digital community engagement methods. Not to displace or replace face-to-face engagement. They both have different types of reach, different types of risk, different types of exclusion associated with them. Digital doesn’t displace face-to-face but can complement it and in such times as we’re able to do the face-to-face engagement in a safe way, we’ll encourage projects to do that.

I’ll share some examples of the platforms that we’ve used and encouraged. But another thing that we’ve encouraged projects to do is really think about the kinds of themes and priorities for their engagement work so that they align with government priorities for supporting health and wellbeing-related initiatives and particularly supporting the most clinically vulnerable communities in our towns. And that’s not just because those are areas of greatest need, but really encouraging our community partner organisations to work on those kinds of priorities and working with local community health partners, NHS clusters and clinical commissioning groups as part of our community engagement work really helps to increase the relevance of community and third sector organisations and to increase their chances of application for funding from central government, lottery distributors and so on as much of their funding has been targeted and tagged specifically for health priorities and clinically vulnerable groups. So there’s a part in there that’s about increasing the resilience and relevance of community organisations to be able to apply for that funding and sustain themselves in the face of COVID.

We all got completely fed up with the wall-to-wall news about COVID the whole time and we were under an embargo about talking about the project as well for very good reason, but many of our schemes were keen to talk about their projects, think about the way that they could continue their engagement. And really in response to a lot of appetite from our partners and their community partners, there was great appetite to do early creative digital engagement that really has encouraged us to innovate the ways in which we’re supporting the projects.

And the cultural programme team have been able to bring forward pilot grants funded by the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund to really support early creative digital engagement, to use digital technology to produce exciting, creative content about the history of the high street to keep people’s attention and motivation up for the scheme in the face of the pandemic. We’re starting to see some applications for those pilot grants and there are some really exciting opportunities that really complement the use of digital online workshops, the use of Zoom and other video conferencing technologies to run workshops, consultations etc. What we’re really seeing is the power of the broader culture sector to be able to motivate and engage local communities around the High Streets project. So, there’s a really innovative way that the cultural programme is really bolstering and boosting that early engagement in quite an exciting way. Last but not least of course, responding to the capacity of individual projects and schemes, local authorities, we’ve had to have a rolling deadline for the submission of community engagement plans.

And actually that’s been quite a helpful thing because it’s allowed us to have much more direct one-to-one contact with each scheme rather than a big vertical take-off of all schemes happening at the same time. I’m going to stop there because we are short of time but I did want to leave some time for some questions so I’d appreciate the support of my webinar team and Rachel in identifying any questions that any of you may have or have been raised in the chat function to discuss at this stage.

Hannah: Wonderful. Thanks Michael. That’s absolutely brilliant from you and Jules and I’m sure our delegates will have taken a great deal from it. There has certainly been lots of interaction in the chat. Guys, do take the opportunity to pop your questions in there. As Michael says, we’ve only got a few minutes. If you’re able to stay on, please do, but yeah, start putting your questions in for our speakers. Michael, there were a few coming through as you went along. And one that I’ve got here from David is about places of worship which are a key element of many of our historic high streets of course. Many are or have the potential to become potent community hubs. “What role do you see for these community and cultural assets as the High Streets HAZ model is developed over the coming years?”

Michael: I think the prospects are great for this and I know Rachel will probably want to input on this too having worked on a significant places of worship project. There aren’t a great number of churches that have been mentioned within the community engagement plans to date in terms of their use for community engagement purposes and uses specifically through the High Streets scheme but there has been some great work carried out by the Diocese of Hereford on the diversification of church uses across a rurally deprived county and there are some very good examples. A really fantastic toolkit called “Crossing the Threshold” which lays out all sorts of methods and means of diversifying church uses and opening them up beyond being used purely as places of work to a broad range of cultural uses. But we have also at Historic England run the Taylor Review Pilot… [AUDIO CUTS OUT- they discuss a technical hitch]

Jules: Just very quickly on that point about places of worship -Hello David- we can’t fund capital investment in places of worship through the High Streets HAZ programme or indeed places of worship that are owned by the Churches Conservation Trust and therefore really our only opportunity to engage with places of worship would be on the community engagement and the cultural side. So I would see it as very important to… They are a community asset. So if there is a place of worship on your high street, bring them in to the programme to be a community engagement activity as a community asset, as something that can help with the engagement programme.

Hannah: Fantastic. Thanks Jules and thanks very much for stepping in half way through the answer. Having your very own Matt Hancock moment there. That’s brilliant.

Rachel: Can I… Sorry Hannah to interrupt, can I add something very quickly just on that point. As Michael mentioned, I worked on the Taylor Review but following David’s comment, I have seen, although places of worship are not embedded necessarily in the plans, I have seen them listed as stakeholders and I think it’s really important, particularly depending on the proximity of these places of worship to your high street, that they are considered. One scheme, I can’t remember who sadly, but when they were have some building work done, they were planning on doing some of their community engagement outside but then, I think it was the local church stepped up and they have been using it as a bit of a hub and a hole and a place to hold meetings. And, I mean, places of worship historically are the centre of a lot of these communities anyway so it does make sense to include them in your stakeholder mapping and utilise them where you can. But beyond that, for the long term development I’m not sure and I daresay it will be unique to each scheme.

Hannah: Absolutely, but it’s so worth hearing about what others are doing isn’t it and examples that each of us can use to our advantage. Lovely. Thank you Rachel. I’ve got I think one more question here. A really nice one here from Edward. I’ll ask that. I realise that some people are obviously having to log out because of course, we have hit two o’clock. Please do. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll keep going with a couple of questions for those that can stay and this one is from Edward: “How do you ensure that young people are involved at a governance level within the decision making process? We found lots of older people are very involved, often in [INAUDIBLE] capacity, but less so in younger demographics”. Do either of you guys have good examples of where young people have managed to be involved in these type of engagement schemes.

Jules: I don’t have any examples but I’m hoping that Michael would. What I can tell you from the [INAUDIBLE] point of view is that there was one project that did involve… I think he was probably about 16, so he wasn’t involved at a governance level but he was involved at a very practical level in one of the projects that we were helping to deliver. He came along with his mum but he wasn’t just there as an also-ran, he was actively involved. But I’m sure there will be good examples that we have of young people being involved at a leadership, at a governance level. Michael may well be able to come up with some. What I suggest Edward, is that we make contact with you afterwards.

[Michaels audio returns]

Michael: I think that there are… Youth is a huge priority in terms of key community groups to be engaged across many of the projects and I think there are, off the top of my head, at least 20 that kind of major on youth engagement as a really key priority. It’s one of those joint strategic needs areas that’s a big, big thing for local authorities particularly in the face of COVID and the impact on young people. In terms of direct involvement in sort of main board I don’t have any examples to bring to mind, but in Blackpool, for example, there’s a lot of will to engage with young entrepreneurs, there’s a young entrepreneurs programme where the scheme are really trying to work with local colleges and local businesses to support young people, to share their ideas and gain opportunities in establishing businesses and piloting ideas in local markets for example to really promote their interests and opportunity and their say in projects. I think another thing that we can see across many of the projects is a real serious attempt and willingness to engage with apprenticeship opportunities and traineeships, so really thinking about all areas of the physical interventions and other work around the project and where are there are opportunities to involve local young apprentices and young people from colleges and so on in different parts of the scheme. One of the things that we may well see I think across the almost 70 projects is that there may be some that have specific new steering groups or youth panels that provide feedback and input on different areas of the project. But, as I did say early on, many of these plans are in their infancy so we’ll really wait to have those submitted over the next few months and…

Jules: I’ve just thought of a couple but not at a governance level but Sunderland has a youth parliament and there has been specific engagement in the Sunderland HAZ with the youth parliament but not at a governance level. And North Tyneside used to have –I don’t know if it still does, I hope it does- a children’s university as a social project and there was active involvement with the children’s university in one or two of the Fish Quay projects, but again, not at a governance level.