Thinking and Working Strategically

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Community councils are encouraged to play a proactive role in the issues which affect their areas.

The Proactive Role

Community councils should see it as their job to promote particular courses of action or projects in the community. Ideally, a community council should not wait for problems and issues to be brought before it. Rather, it should identify the various issues which it thinks might affect the community, both in the short and longer term.

Having identified those issues as best it can, it would then proceed to set out some priorities for the community and the community council. This involves thinking what action(s) will bring most benefit for the community, and considering the role the community council might play in making things happen.

It also means taking a decision as to the overall direction in which the community council should move. For example, some community councils have identified the threat to their physical environment as the key issue for their community and have responded by developing a strategy which sets out a series of steps which they intend to take at local level to counter that threat. Other community councils have identified the improvement of community facilities as the key issue and have developed a strategy around that.

So what is involved in thinking and working strategically?

Examining what is going on inside and outside the community

The first step is to take a careful look at the ways in which your community might be developed. Examine the needs that are apparent in the community and try to identify any particular hopes and ambitions that might be translated into reality. Then have a look at what is going on in the outside world. What are the major opportunities or threats? You might consider the likely impact of matters such as the availability of European or Lottery funding in this category. How could your community council take full advantage of the opportunities available.

Reviewing the options

The next stage is to set out all of the possibilities, all of the things that the community council might get involved in to benefit the community. These are your strategic options and they need to be carefully considered before deciding which particular option(s) to pursue. Try to be clear about how much time, energy and money would have to be put in to the various options, and establish whether or not those could be justified in terms of the outcome that you would want to achieve.

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Making strategic decisions

Once you are satisfied that you have examined all of the options open to the community council it is possible to start taking decisions about which option(s) offer most benefit, or make most sense given the circumstances. Effectively this means choosing a direction for the community council to pursue. Direction is important for any organisation since it allows the people involved to share a vision of where they are going.

Once you have chosen the overall direction ,try to consult widely within your community. Find out whether people in general are behind you, and try to identify any particular concerns that they might have. By consulting early there is a greater likelihood that the community as a whole will be supportive of any action that the community council takes subsequently. It also helps to minimise the danger that the community council moves in a direction which alienates the community as a whole.

Setting the Objectives

Once you are clear about what the overall goal is it is possible to set very specific objectives. For example, if your chosen goal is "to improve the cleanliness of the area", your objectives might be as follows:

• to make local people aware of the issues;
• to involve local school children in projects;
• to carry out specific clean-up projects.

Developing the Strategy

When the objectives are clearly set out you can then consider the things that need to be done in order to achieve them. This requires you to think about which actions are likely to be the most effective in the particular circumstances of your community council.

Summary

Some community councils take the view that it is their primary responsibility to respond to matters that are brought to them by their community or by other external bodies. Others take the view that their role extends beyond that of being a purely reactive body to that of being an initiator of plans and activities for the community as a whole.

Thinking and acting strategically involves:

• taking a proactive approach to community matters;
• examining the needs and aspirations of the community and the factors in the outside world which affect (or may affect in the future) the community;
• considering the options carefully;
• selecting a particular direction in which to move;
• setting clear objectives to get you to your chosen goal;
• developing a plan of action as to how those objectives will be met.

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