What did we do?

The workshop took place at The Heart of Newhaven centre in Newhaven, Edinburgh. The workshop involved 20 participants taking part in 4 activities over the course of one day. The participants were split into groups of 3, each group representing a different scale; Home, Neighbourhood and City.

The first activity involved cards that represented topics from the ASF-UK Resilience Framework.

These topics encompassed social, environmental and built environment issues such as health and wellbeing, local economy, mobility and access, and issues related to land, air and water.

The participants selected topics that best represented activities they are currently involved in, what issues they would like to see change in as well as areas that they would like to collaborate on and shared this with the rest of the group. This activity allowed participants to introduce themselves to one another and understand the areas everyone is interested in.

The clusters included projects such as providing skills for the future, empowered streets, community energy and heat retrofit projects, harnessing community assets, increasing social and local enterprises.

The third activity allowed participants to imagine they were part of a community task force that have been asked to explore how an initiative (or a series of initiatives) can tackle the cluster they identified in the previous activity. They used a Project Cycle to identify strategies and specific actions that would allow them to move closer to their vision.

The strategy cycle explored a collective vision, what the entry points for change were, who the major stakeholders were and who holds the power, influence knowledge and responsibility. It also explored who might currently be excluded from these discussions and how the initiative could have an impact globally. The participants explored what the risks involved would be and looked at what actions could be taken towards the project goal.

The final activity explored what a set of parameters and principles that would enable this project and similar projects to flourish would be. This was done by scale, and then presented to the whole group of participants. They were asked to finish this sentence: “For residents and community groups to contribute to a transformative, resilient, and fair shift to Net Zero Edinburgh, there needs to be…”

The group then tagged the principles that most resonated with them, or felt were most important. These cross scale principles are detailed in section ; ‘What can we take forward?”

The next activity encompassed finding connections between the topics selected. These connections included ones that were people/ organisation based, place-based, deep systemic connections, sector based connection etc and spanned between topics from the framework. This allowed the opportunity for participants to unite around topics and focus the group on issues they were most passionate about. The group then brainstormed potential possibilities that could arise from the interconnections and agreed on a particular grouping that identified an initiative that the team could explore further.