SURF is a supportive member of the Community Development Alliance Scotland (CDAS), a national partnership network of organisations with an interest in community development practice.
On 25 June, CDAS teamed up with the Scottish Community Development Network and the Scottish Community Development Centre to deliver a joint conference on the theme of ‘Community Development: What Vision for Scotland?’. SURF Chief Executive Andy Milne was pleased to have been invited to participate in this event by facilitating a discussion group on regeneration.
This discussion group was tasked with exploring three broad questions:
- Why is strengthening communities important?
- What do we need to do to support communities to be able to take part effectively?
- What is the vision for community development in Scotland in bringing strands of policy and practice together?
Please click on the link below to download a brief report of the discussion outcomes:
SURF CDAS workshop notes July 2014
CDAS will be producing a full conference report for dissemination in the coming weeks. You can subscribe to the CDAS e-bulletin to receive details of availability by entering your name and email address in a box on the right-hand side of their website homepage.
At the same conference, CoSLA Chief Executive Rory Mair announced that the CoSLA Commission for Strengthening Local Democracy intends to launch its final recommendations report at the end of this month. In an interim report published in April, the Commission claimed that “local democracy in Scotland has been gradually dismantled over the last 50 years”. SURF contributed an evidence paper to the Commission’s process that is available here.
