Building communities  

Participants

The conference marked our first attempt to bring together a range of participants from across our curriculum strand, which broadly includes:

• Voluntary and Community Sector Skills
• Social Enterprise
• Community Development.

Keynote speakers

Our keynote speakers helped provide participants with practice and policy expertise across the three subject areas.  This provided the basis for further discussions in our workshop sessions. Our speakers focused on national and regional policy initiatives within the area of community learning, as well as employer engagement and volunteering and the challenges that face community development professionals.

Points raised included:

• the availability of funds
• problems faced in the sector in terms of producing hard evidence to illustrate the outcomes of projects
• issues of having no interface between local authority and funders in general.

Workshops

Different models of employer engagement were explored. In this sector traditional divisions between employers and employees are blurred because many participants are both.

Participants were keen to know how the SLN as a whole were engaging with the workforce development unit at Brighton and Hove Council.

Feedback from the community learning strand raised some issues around creating the voice of learners across our curriculum strand.  NIACE have offered to work with us to find ways of establishing learner voices.

Links to the materials from the event are at the bottom of the screen.