Our Place - Blackburn

The Our Place project aimed to transform empty shops in both Blackburn and Taunton into accessible creative and learning centres. The overall aim of the Our Place project in Taunton was to provide creative and learning centres in empty shop, with a focus on presenting a learning offer that will support people to start engaging more actively with the changes in their community.

It was underpinned by the vision that to be successful and sustainable, regeneration programmes need communities of confident, curious, critical and creative people to engage with and help direct the regeneration process.

Our Place, Your Place: Taunton was a heritage focused project that aimed to bring the local residents together to share memories, thoughts and pictures of the town as well as learn about how Taunton is changing. The focus of the programme was built around Taunton’s past, present and future, with the first three weeks focusing on the past, and the second three focusing on the present and future of Taunton.

The two main partners were Project Taunton and Somerset Heritage Services, with support provided from Taunton Deane Borough Council. Associate partners included Thrive (a celebratory arts organisation for Somerset), Somerset Waterways Development Trust and Transition Town Taunton.

www.projecttaunton.co.uk/taunton-now/our-place-your-place.html

What?

Taunton suffers from high levels of unemployment and informal learning was viewed as the first step for many such adults to access training and routes into employment. Other local factors included regeneration in the town centre, as well as a lack of easily accessible informal learning environments. Taunton lacks a town centre based learning institution, and local research has shown that travel distance, time and cost are barriers to participation.

The project theme linked very well to the current developments in the town. The museum is currently closed for renovation, and a new heritage centre is in development. Therefore the ‘heritage’ past, present and future theme worked well, and provided an opportunity for local people to engage in heritage whilst the museum was closed.

Taunton ran workshop sessions with a focus on informal drop in sessions. Results suggest that there was successful engagement of local people in the events and activities around the past element of the heritage theme. Taunton offered a range of sessions, with these sessions reflecting the overall theme of past, present and future. Examples of topics covered in sessions included local history, climate change, sculpture, writing, art, local walks, talks on local projects and developments, current regeneration plans for the town.

When?

Our Place, Your Place: Taunton provided six weeks of activity running from 8th February to 20th March 2010.

How?

The project received funding totalling £50,000 from The Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills (BIS) Skills Learning Revolution Transformation Fund.

The project was underpinned by partnership working – the key partners were Project Taunton and Somerset Heritage Services, with support provided from Taunton Deane Borough Council. The approach was built upon previous partnership working between the partners, and the opportunity the Our Place project would provide Heritage Services with to have a showcase whilst the museum was being renovated.

Taunton employed an external consultant to help deliver the project, and this was important as it clearly helped to increase capacity to deliver, with key partners having insufficient capacity to deliver it otherwise. Whilst the use of such external partners has some clear benefits (e.g. as well as helping to increase capacity, they can offer an external/fresh perspective on the planning and delivery of the project), more planning time (both delivery planning and strategic planning and linkages) is required in such circumstances, and this needs to be considered carefully for future projects.

Marketing and promotion was an important aspect of Our Place, Your Place: Taunton especially given the need to compensate for location limitations. Key routes that proved effective are thought to be the use of the 24 hour TV screen in the shop window, being featured on the regional ITV news, achieving (national) profile via a radio broadcast from the shop as part of the BBC A History of the World project, and a variety of other local media (radio interviews and local newspaper). Support from the PR Team at Project Taunton, who are well experienced at community engagement also helped with this. In terms of lessons for future projects, partners noted that the effort and resources required to develop and implement effective marketing should not be underestimated.

Summary: Impact and Outcome of the project

In terms of participation levels, Our Place, Your Place: Taunton received a total of 4,148 visits (massively exceeding the target) which was a combination of workshop attendees and drop in visits.

Further impacts from the project included:

• Community Impacts: In particular supporting community/social cohesion, which was achieved by bringing different age groups together through the workshops and drop in sessions. Taunton partners noted that local people reported engaging more with their elderly neighbours as a result of the project – through the reminiscence activities and the heritage elements, thereby supporting community cohesion.

• Learning Impacts: As well as directly providing the informal learning environment, the projects also signposted participants onto other (both formal and informal) learning activities – e.g. Taunton promoted the courses of the Somerset Schools for Learning. Other learning impacts included individual participants that have been stimulated and encouraged to look at other routes to learning or volunteering as a result of the project, and also people who would not normally engage in cultural activity (e.g. by visiting a museum, gallery etc.) being able to do so.

• Business/Economy Impacts: There have also been business/economic benefits from the project, in that the empty shop used is likely to be brought back into commercial use in the near future, and it is thought that the project showing what can be done with the premises is believed to have (at least partly) contributed to this.

• Involvement in Plans: Elements of the programme that addressed the present and future included activities about Project Taunton, outlining the background, progress to date and future plans for the town. The project also included presentations and activities about other developments in the town (including the castle, the cricket ground, the Brewhouse etc).

• Products and resources: Our Place: Your Place: Taunton is also producing a community archive, a DVD, and is contributing to the development of a national ‘how to’ guide.

Evaluation

An evaluation of Our Place, Your Place: Taunton was carried out and the key lessons for other empty shops projects related to:

• The importance of having a sufficient timescale to plan and deliver all aspects of the project.

• Finding appropriate premises is very important, and the task of finding and securing an appropriate shop location can take a significant amount of time.

• Offering a varied programme of activities (good mix between drop in and workshop sessions), and maintaining an open door policy are important in helping enable engagement with a wide variety of groups.

• Informality of learning offered is a key success factor, as is developing the project to allow for local delivery to be sufficiently flexible to suit the localities.

• Our Place is a ‘labour intensive’ project that required a significant amount of staff time and resource. This needs to be fully appreciated in any future such projects.

• A significant amount of effort and resources were committed to publicity, promotion and marketing, which proved to be successful (as measured by participation level) – the requirement for promotional activity needs to be recognised.

• Partnership working is a key aspect of the planning and delivery of such projects, and receiving time commitment from partners is important. The time required to develop effective partnership working needs to be borne in mind, especially when external capacity is used in the delivery of the project.

• Measuring Impact: A balance between collecting impact data and providing
  informality needs to be reached. Whilst this is a difficult, it may be that collecting some of this information in a relaxed and informal way may allow the data to be collected without adversely affecting the informal format of the learning sessions. This should be considered for future projects.

Future Developments

Partners are considering the legacy of the Our Place project in Taunton, and meetings have been taking place to consider the various options in terms of sustaining the project into the future – either in another location, or via a more flexible outreach approach that does not use a single location.

Contact details

Robbie Lowes
Project Taunton
robbie.lowes@projecttaunton.co.uk