Weekly Digest: 3rd March 2018

The start of March is normally a time to look forward to Spring and beyond, but the ‘beast from the east’ is making that a little difficult for the moment. Thankfully, as I write, this particular beast looks to be finally on its way out, so I’ll take a little time this week to look forward but not until, on behalf of us all on the Steering Group, I say…

  1. Thank you very much, thank you very, very, very much!
    • To each and every one of you who have taken the time to come along to one of our consultation events: Thanks very much! It was great to see you and hear your views.
    • We held our final event last Monday at the Village and around 40 people came along to have a look, ask us questions and – most importantly – let us know their views and opinions. On top of that over 140 have completed our survey, either at an event or else directly on line.
    • Overall, we are very pleased with the response we have gathered. It has provided a lot of useful information as well as some great suggestions for us to take forward
    • We are keeping the online survey going for a further week so any last-minute contributions (or further thoughts) will be very welcome. Here’s the link.
  2. Barracks Masterplan Produced
    • Peter did bring along his draft master plan for the Barracks and not unexpectedly it generated a lot of interest. Peter took away a lot of useful feedback and will be incorporating those ideas into the next version of the plan.
    • We hope to have a revised version in the next week or so and once we have an electronic version, we’ll add it to our website and post a link to it in a future edition, so you can all have a look.
    • As mentioned last week, the draft will be subject to ongoing refinement, but it is a great start and provides something concrete to look at and build on.
  3. Looking forward: Neighbourhood Plan next steps
    • The Steering Group are meeting next week and the main item on the agenda is to consider the next steps in producing our Plan
    • The community consultation phase was a vital component, but we now need to buckle down and start to develop our vision for the future and identify the main objectives we want to see delivered. After than we need write the policies that will ensure our objectives are met. It is likely this next phase will take us 6 months or so.
    • We will be breaking down this significant task into manageable chunks of work and it is likely we will need help to gather and collate the evidence as well as to draft up our policies
    • I know a lot of you have indicated you are willing to provide some ‘hands on’ support and it will be very welcome. Once the SG have decided on the best way forward, and identified specific pieces of work, I’ll provide more details in a future digest how you can get involved.
  4. And finally.…
    • We are always looking to extend our communications to everyone in our Area whether signed up with us or not. So, we have started to produce articles for the free papers such as Grapevine, Breeze & Toton Connected. If you know of any publication that we could use to publish news about us, please let me know. We want to reach as wide an audience as we can
    • We are also looking to improve the management of this weekly digest. At the moment I look after the mailing lists myself but with over 650 email addresses, we need to be sure we provide a professional service to you. So, we have signed up with MailChimp, which is a commonly used package to manage and distribute e-newsletters. More on this in the next week or so when we finalise the process. Rest assured we will take great care of your personal data and only provide MailChimp with the absolute minimum they need. But if you have concerns about us moving to this service, please let me know    

And that’s all for this week folks – a little shorter than previous weeks’ editions, and all the better for it! Tune in next week for more news and ramblings

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