From Local Priorities to Grant-Ready Projects
The purpose of the Community Action Plan was not only to record what mattered most to local people, but to empower communities to take action themselves. The emphasis throughout was on turning shared priorities into practical, deliverable projects that communities could lead and sustain over time.
Rather than acting as a statement of aspirations alone, the Community Action Plan and accompanying Tourism Strategy were designed to go further. They identified specific projects that the community were willing to undertake and provided supporting documentation to a standard that enabled communities to apply directly for external grant funding as opportunities arose.
Inclusive and Participatory Development
To ensure broad representation and legitimacy, County Councillors, representatives of Community Councils, local community groups, and individual residents were all invited to attend an initial presentation delivered by Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and Tourism Partnership Mid Wales.
This session introduced the principles of community-led action planning and explained how the process would align with national policy and best practice in sustainable development.
Alignment with Welsh Government Policy
The first section of the Action Plan was written by NRW staff and explicitly mapped how community-led sustainable development contributes to relevant Welsh Government policies. This ensured that volunteers applying for grant funding would not have to research this information but could easily cut and paste information into a grant application form.
Template
A structured plan template was used, containing themed headings under which any representative, community group, or individual volunteer could propose a project. This open and inclusive approach ensured that ideas were captured transparently and that community ambition directly shaped the plan.
Refinement, Integration, and Consultation
As proposals were gathered, the Action Plan underwent a detailed process of review and refinement. Where similar actions were suggested by multiple groups, projects were combined or revised to avoid duplication and strengthen impact.
Once a coherent draft had been developed, the plan was subject to a full public consultation process, ensuring that the final version accurately reflected community priorities and had broad local support.
Finally for each project occuring on the forest, meetings were held between the NRW staff on secondment to the CMI project, the forest manager and the volunteers to agree permission and detail of the processes.
Grant-Ready by Design: A Key Advantage
One of the major strengths of this approach was that the paperwork for grant applications were not developed in isolation and the more time consuming tasks of a grant application which can be offputting to volunteers were avoided. .
The Action Plan process enabled the process of generating evidience of community consultation to be undertaken once rather than for each individual grant application. , A list of Welsh government policy objectives were made available which could be cut and pasted into each grant application and practical delivery details including permissions had been agreed in advance with the Forest Manager.
As a result, when appropriate funding opportunities became available, community volunteers are able to apply quickly, confidently, and—more often than not—successfully.make grant applications.