WHAT WE LEARNED | 4 MINUTE READ
Bringing People Together Through Parks
Casey Morrison
Community & Participation Lead in the Future Parks Accelerator programme
Across multiple local authorities, Casey Morrison has been bringing people together to look at how they go about volunteering, consultation, engagement and activating their public spaces. Here, he shares what he’s learnt along the way.
Q&A With Casey Morrison
Question
How does collaboration work between local authorities and the voluntary sector?
Answer
When local authorities are thinking about how they interact with residents and with the voluntary sector, it often comes down to three things. One is, how do you want people to be involved in the governance of green spaces, deciding what the priorities are? The second is around the management of green spaces – how those priorities are delivered, and the third part is in terms of the operations, so things like weeding, planting flower beds, litter collection.
Collaboration has worked very differently in different places in the Future Parks Accelerator cohort. In Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, The Parks Foundation has grown and taken on a leading role in activating spaces, working constructively with the Council. In Camden and Islington, for example, a lot of work was done to map the voluntary sector organisations around parks in order to look at how they can all come together with the public sector to look after their green spaces and animate their parks in different ways.
Question
What are the different theories of change or frameworks that people have used?
Answer
Lots of the Future Parks Accelerator local authorities have really narrowed in on what their Theory of Change is. They asked themselves, “where are they moving from, and what are they moving to?” For example, Plymouth was really clear that they wanted to work with social enterprises to animate the buildings, spaces and community assets in their parks. They started by mapping all of these out and then ran a leadership programme with local voluntary sector organisations to help them think about how to run businesses in these spaces and bring in audiences who wouldn’t have visited the parks without this added impetus.
In Edinburgh, Greenspace Scotland ran a project called Young Placemakers, where they worked with young people across the city to look at how green public spaces might be used in 50 years’ time. They looked at questions like: How do young people care about nature? How do they interact with issues like climate change? How are public spaces being used during, for example, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival? Where’s the line between commercialisation and communities?
Question
What went well?
Answer
An awful lot of stuff went well! I think there was a real sense of purpose and mission amongst the people who were leading on this work. What’s helped is that we've not had to start from scratch – a lot of people came to the initial meetings with a substantial amount of evidence that really created a sense of possibility. For example, the Cambridgeshire network provided a great piece of consultancy work that someone had done in 2015 which mapped all of the parks and friends-of groups across the entire area. Many local authorities have this kind of information available, and it’s a great idea to dig it out before embarking on a project like this.
Question
And what could have been improved upon?
Answer
Aside from logistical hurdles like Covid, we mainly stuck to a principle from the very beginning to stop doing the things that weren't going well. With projects like these, we have to start where the energy is, and with the people who want our help with what they're doing.
Question
How do you reach communities who are not as commonly involved in parks and green spaces?
Answer
We know that our green spaces adequately serve the majority of the population, but not everyone. There are often specific reasons for that, and we have to understand what those reasons are in order to tackle them. For example, there are some communities that enjoy communal meals and would benefit from big spaces to share food together or benches for bigger families. However, this isn’t something we often provide. We need to partner with the community itself to make sure our green spaces best serve the people who live on the doorstep.
Sometimes, the barrier is physical. For example, lots of the Victorian parks have railings all the way around. We know that if you want to get kids going from school to a green space on their doorstep, reducing the number of roads that they have to cross and reducing the perception of distance is crucial. So, some parks have taken out elements of the stone walls or railings, worked to reduce traffic and greened some of the surrounding streets in order to better connect that audience with their local green spaces.
Well used, well loved and well cared for - everyone wants their parks and green spaces to feel like this, but how do you make it happen systematically at scale? How do you put parks at the heart of the community? (35 mins)
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