This space focuses on what it means to feel part of a place or community. It includes reflections on participation, inclusion, and the practices that help people connect and belong in meaningful ways.
Training Community Researchers
As mentioned elsewhere, the underlying drive to create Community Researchers was to create a cadre of ‘good listeners’ within the community – to gather stories of lived experiences. A lot of work done...
Storytelling
Do you remember what your favourite book was as a child? Or perhaps your current favourite film or TV programme? My favourite book, as a child, was Alice in Wonderland. A well-read, well-worn book th...
Methodology not Ideology
Developing a workshop-based program to learn what kind of understanding and ideas evolve when we start from individual experiences. After the enthusiasm of finding that many people were interested in ...
What do we mean by 'the system'?
While working on the Belong in Plymouth programme, we often found ourselves talking about ‘the system’ when we were discussing how things currently work and how we might effect change in our city. But...
Defining the 'vision' for Belong in Plymouth
In February 2022, the core team of Belong in Plymouth came together to create a Theory of Change for our work. This proved to be challenging due to the emergent nature of the work and the trickiness o...
Making Sense of Belonging: From Insight to Action through Community Research
“There is massive value in the way that that has brought people into what it means to research and gather information and data…even if they've just touched on it…you can take some story of like, Marga...
Hope in The Heart Exhibition Spring 2022
Hope in the Heart brought together artists with lived experience of poor mental health to share their thoughts in a reflective way with professionals. It was one of our first attempts at bringing diff...
Neighbourocracy Autumn 2022
28 people, including 6 young people, attended a gathering in Autumn 2022 with Nate Whitestone from A Fairer Society and Joseph Rathinam from the Neighborocracy Movement. Joseph is a South Indian commu...
Processing conversations together
You might be wondering what happens to conversations once they are collected? Well, I am happy to say that back in November 2023 we reached a significant milestone. With the support of Health Determin...
Stage 2 submission - October 2021
In 4 years time, success looks like: An established, ongoing community conversation continually feeding into strategic decision-making. Quality support for immediate community action, which is furth...
Belong in Plymouth @ Matters of the HeART
On May 18th, Belong in Plymouth hosted an event at Ocean Studios to emphasize the importance of listening. The event aimed to make participants feel heard, regardless of their roles or labels, and to ...
Creativity in the face of Stuckness
It's common for emergent work to become stuck. We had been trying to build momentum for grassroots work in a local community to demonstrate how partnership work could really make a difference at a hyp...