What you need to know
Who holds the power?
The difference between an agency led plan that involves the community (like a Locality Plan), and a community-led plan is the importance and impact of the community-led aspect of it. It’s the community who are the driving force behind a community-led plan and the community who are looking to take actions to meet the needs of their local area.
Community-led engagement often attracts wider buy-in from the local community than agency-led engagement or consultation and communities can often be really creative about how they reach out to people to make sure there’s a depth and diversity to the issues that are identified and the discussions around what needs to change.
A community-led plan will involve partners and will often have partners agree to lead on taking actions forward, but there will be lots of community-led action in there too. It’s not a plan created to sit on a shelf and it’s not a wish-list created to hand over to someone else to say, “here’s what we would like you to do”. There’s no local power in that arrangement – you’re dependent on whether someone else will do what you want them to.
With a community-led plan, you’re looking at what you, as a community, can do, whether that’s direct actions you can take, or where you might have a lobbying or campaigning role to encourage public sector bodies to provide new or improved services or do things differently.
A comparison guide