Sustainable Community Strategy 2008-2026
The new Sustainable Community Strategy 2008-2026 (pdf 2359k) 'Improving our communities together' was launched at the Annual Stakeholder Event on 22 April 2008.
What is a Sustainable Community Strategy?
A Sustainable Community Strategy sets out the vision and priorities to improve the economic, social and environmental well being of an area. It clearly shows how partners will work together to develop sustainable communities.
What is in our Strategy?
Our new vision
'Sustainable, inclusive, safe, healthy, prosperous communities thriving in a quality enviroment'.
The Strategy has been developed under the following shared priorities:
Developing strong inclusive communities
- Ensuring safer communities
- Improving health and well being
- Developing a prosperous economy and enterprising community
- Living within environmental limits and,
- Tackling disadvantage and promoting equality of opportunity as a key shared priority running through all the themes
The Strategy sets out:
- Our long-term vision for North Somerset
- The key challenges we need to consider
- Our progress to date
- Our shared priorities and the improvements we want to see
- How the work will be delivered
Developing the Strategy
The Strategy has built on the previous Community Strategy, the views of local people, particularly the NSP consulation programme that took place between May and October 2006, and evidence of the challenges, opportunities and priorites for North Somerset.
An initial draft Strategy was available for public comment from mid-November to mid-December 2007. Comments received during that period have been reviewed and used to inform the final draft.
A Sustainability Appraisal was carried out on the draft Strategy. The recommendations from this Appraisal have also been used to inform the final Strategy. A further appraisal will look at the delivery aspects of the final Strategy.
Sustainability Report (Dec 07) (pdf, 51k)
To develop the Strategy we worked with officers (the project group) from across our partner organisations to identify the key trends and issues for North Somerset that need to be addressed.
Following several meetings of this group and NSP delivery partnerships a structure for the new Strategy was agreed by the Board.
The Community Strategy 2004-2025
The first Community Strategy was prepared by the North Somerset Partnership and launched in 2004.
Since then the Government has undertaken a widespread review of Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) and published initial outline guidance to strengthen the role of LSPs and refocus the Community Strategy into a Sustainable Community Strategy.