Community-led Stewardship: Shaping Resilient, Sustainable Places CONFERENCE

Friday 15 September 2023 @ Chesterton Community Hall, Oxfordshire

10:00 – 14:00 (followed by lunch)

Community First Oxfordshire is delighted to give you advance notice of this upcoming conference.

One constant in communities is change, and every community is unique. Yet common challenges and opportunities face and shape all our places, population change, housing development, health and wellbeing, the climate and ecological crisis…

With speakers from CFO, Wild Oxfordshire, London Development Trust and Eynsham Parish Council, the conference will consider some of the ‘big ticket’ challenges facing us: making local planning and development work best for the community and enabling projects and initiatives to meet social and community needs. It will also showcase ways in which our communities are rising to these placemaking challenges.

The conference will also launch a new CFO service: Community Stewardship Support.

 Stewardship means managing assets across the long term, such as community facilities, housing, green and open spaces, and parks and play areas. CFO believes community-led stewardship has the potential to revitalize communities, putting local residents and their needs front and centre in asset management and ownership, and driving community development. Because another constant in our communities is the extraordinary range of skills, commitment, and determination of people working on ways and means to create places which thrive long into the future and help us live healthy and fulfilling lives.

Just last month the government produced a document entitled ‘Unleashing Rural Opportunity”. A publication detailing how the government plans to “support growth and prosperity in rural areas”. 

The document explains how they are launching this new initiative based on four broad priorities that are important for rural areas to prosper:

• Growing the Rural Economy
• Connectivity
• Homes and Energy
• Communities

The government are:

• Investing £110 million through the Rural England Prosperity Fund. CFO looked into this earlier this week: “Investing in Rural Communities” – Rural Housing Week 2023 | Community First Oxfordshire (communityfirstoxon.org)
• Supporting the development of rural skills including through Skills Bootcamps, sector-based Work Academy Programmes and our £1.5 million Forestry Training Fund. At Spring Budget 2023, a
  further investment of £34 million in financial year 2024-25 was announced meaning more adults will be able to get the skills they need.
• Providing funding to Public Practice, a not for profit company which supports the development of placemaking leadership capability, to expand their associate programme to support more
  local authorities.
• Investing £3.2 billion a year across the UK (£2.4 billion in England) into the farming sector through
  schemes that support sustainable and productive farm businesses to produce the food we need and
  improve the state of nature.
• Building on our recent Farm to Fork summit by helping our farmers and food producers in rural communities to capitalise on the enormous global demand for British food and drink through our export support packages, investment in global trade shows and support for key exporting sectors.
• Providing over £50 million funding for our Farming in Protected Landscapes programme and extending it with additional funding until March 2025 to enable farmers in National Parks and Areas
  of Outstanding Natural Beauty to deliver more projects that promote nature and make the landscape more inclusive for visitors. This is in addition to the current 15% increase in funding to Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and £4.4million one off increase we provided to National Parks last year.
• Working with businesses and the British Tourist Authority to showcase our inspiring rural landmarks, countryside, market towns, villages and dramatic coastline, growing the economy, reducing the travel industry’s impact on the natural and built environment and working with local tourism businesses and
  communities to help them thrive.
• Making sure that rural communities have the right childcare provision to support hard-working parents and care givers. This includes investing £289 million in a new childcare ‘pathfinder’ scheme to help deliver wraparound childcare before and after school. We will discuss with rural local authorities to better understand how they support wraparound and meet their sufficiency duty.
• Increasing our funding for bursaries for 16-19s by 10% for the 2023-24 academic year, benefiting those who travel furthest to college each day.

To get more information and read the full policy paper, please click the link below:

Unleashing rural opportunity – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

It is so important to support our rural areas and keep them thriving., this is surely a step in the right direction.