Big Climate Conversation: report of findings - technical annex

Strand 2: Community-led Conversations (AUG - NOV 2019)

The locations of the open-audience workshops were carefully planned to cover as many parts of the country as possible, from Kirkwall to Dumfries, Aberdeen to Portree. Nevertheless, it was not possible to run a facilitated workshop in every community and there were inevitably many people who did not have the opportunity to attend.

The community-led conversations strand of The Big Climate Conversation was therefore designed to enable participation from those people who had not been able to attend a workshop. The aim was to encourage and assist communities to host their own conversation and submit their views directly to the Scottish Government via a feedback form.

In total, 110 feedback forms were received from 99 different community groups that held funded or unfunded events across Scotland, with at least one event taking place in over 80% of Scottish local authorities (26 out of 32), as shown in Figure 3.

The Scottish Government provided support for these community-led conversation events in two ways:

1. A ‘How-To Guide’

Downloadable from the Scottish Government website, the How-To Guide led participants through the series of discussion topics and questions used in the facilitated workshops. The guide was also available on Impact Funding Partners webpage (see information on the grant fund below). Between the two locations, the guide was accessed over 800 times.

To reduce the burden on participants and encourage more communities to take part, the feedback form was much simpler and shorter than the data collection form used at the facilitated workshops. Each group was asked to submit a single form that reflected the collective findings and opinions of the entire group, rather than individual feedback forms for each participant.

Both the How To Guide and feedback form can be downloaded from the Scottish Government website: https://www.gov.scot/publications/the-big-climate-conversation-community-conversation-pack/

2. A Grant Fund

Administered by Impact Funding Partners, up to £300 was available to community groups to cover the costs of organising and hosting a Big Climate Conversation. Each community group could apply to run up to two conversations, which meant funding of up to a total of £600 was available to any one group.

The fund was open for applications from 8 August until 31 October 2019. In total, the Scottish Government provided £17,770.22 in funding for 71 conversations led by 61 different community groups.

Figure 3: Locations of community-led conversations.
(N.B. Where more than one conversation was held in the same location, the total number of conversations is provided in brackets.)