Halls Together

There are approximately 80 community facilities in Monmouthshire and 15 within the rural wards of Newport. These facilities are valuable assets to the communities and are often underutilised. Each tends to work in isolation, so rarely takes advantage of any opportunities to share their own experience, and contribute to the ‘wellbeing’ of all other community facilities in the region.

The project will be in 3 Phases over 12 months. If there is no interest at the end of phases 1 and/or 2, the project will stop.

Phase 1

• Refine the existing community facilities contact list, while considering GDPR and datasets.
• Form a steering group to take the project forward. (Recommendations are two RDP officers and five external members, principally from forward thinking community facility committees).
• Prepare a community facilities questionnaire.
• Poll all committees to understand their own position, and the wider Sharing Considerations
• Evaluate the finding above, and recommend the next steps.

Phase 2

• Engage with specialists in support of the Sharing Considerations, based on the findings from Phase 1
• Prepare a contact list of all potential suppliers, and their willingness to supply “combined supplies” for utilities such as fuel and broadband.
• Offer advice and encouragement to all interested community facility committee members, around the specialist support findings.
• Provide funding advice to help improve facilities e.g. digital, energy, facilities and accessibility etc.,

Phase 3

• Form a social enterprise, with a financial structure and required sources of revenues to carry this project forward in a sustainable manner.
• Create a documentation repository, for example Microsoft Teams
• Set up a social media group e.g. closed Facebook group for sharing ideas, or even Microsoft Team etc.,
• Encourage the group to attend or prepare their own training sessions, such as those provided by the Llanover digital cluster project on topics such as GDPR, health and safety, wellbeing and website training. Training may be used by the wider community and local businesses.