Community Action Plans (CAPs) have been growing in importance over recent years, becoming an essential tool in community development. CAPs do not just express local needs/opportunities and direct locally led development. They are also crucial to lobbying Government for statutory services and communicating with funders and other outside influences.
Community Action Plans are a nationally recognised form of evidence, and key in using legislation like the Community Empowerment Act and The Community Right to Buy. We have developed this plan in such a way that it will be straightforward to develop and ratify as a Local Place Plan under the Planning (Scotland) Bill, should the community wish to do that in the future. This Community Action Plan can be used by anyone in the community needing to demonstrate an unmet need or a market.
The benefits of creating a Community Action Plan were raised at Dunvegan Community Trust’s 2024 AGM. With the co-operation of Dunvegan Community Council and initial funding from the Community Regeneration Fund, and plus further funding from Nadara, Dunvegan Community Trust began working on the Community Action Plan in September 2024.
Often, communities need to outsource much of the work of the development and production of a Community Action Plan to external consultants and designers. This takes a lot of the pressure off of the anchor organisation, but we wanted to take advantage of the skills we have in our community and keep the work and process as local as possible.
We engaged a DCC resident researcher to:
• Support the development of the structure of the plan
• Advise on a method of engagement
• Undertake desktop research gathering all of the publicly available information on our locality into one place
• Develop and analyse a community survey
• Write the final Plan
The first part of this research was context-setting, which included reviewing community consultation work already conducted locally, to identify themes and projects already highlighted by local voices.
We held an inception meeting in Dunvegan Hall to discuss the context of the Community Action Plan, with the help of Community Enterprise, and Catherine MacPhee from Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre. We discussed and gathered feedback on topics to be explored, and over the course of the next 6 months we held nine Public Events discussing: Housing; Land and Sea; Families and Young People; Sport and Leisure; Music and Culture; Health and Resilience; Transport, Paths and Getting Around; Environment and Climate. The events were well attended, with just under 250 turning out in total across the 9 events. We varied the days and times of our events to allow maximum attendance, some on weekday evenings, some on Saturday afternoons, and we also held a number of drop ins at the Community Cafe and Community Hall during the week to allow people to have an informal chat. We also attended the local Senior Citizen’s lunch club and Bun Sgoil Dhun Bheagain, joined by our local Archivist from Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre, and held a teen engagement event in Dunvegan Hall.
A major part of these events included the opportunity to map what we would like to see, where. We brought A1 size maps of Dunvegan Community Council area, North West Skye, the village of Dunvegan itself, and the other townships in our geographic community. We also created transparencies of key mapping considerations, illustrating:
• Land and foreshore ownership in the North West (see Map transparency 1)
• Crofting townships (see Map Transparency 2)
• Catchment areas of Bun Sgoil Dhun Bheagain and Dunvegan Medical Practice (see Map transparency 3)
This spatial approach to discussing project and development has been really important in discussing legacy projects relating to housing, environment, transport and economy. Our Community survey launched in January 2025, also structured across these defined topics, with the addition of questions about our demographics and income. We were determined to make sure the survey was as in depth as possible, to give respondents the opportunity to dig deep into their local knowledge and experience. Having a survey which was designed and delivered in a very local way meant that despite being 70 questions long, it all felt very relevant. We delivered hard copy surveys to every household in the DCC area, as well as the option of online completion. We had a fantastic response - 130 adult responses (40% of our households). As Dunvegan itself is a hub for public services and employment, we also designed an online survey for people outwith the DCC area, gaining 70 responses. We had an online survey specifically for teens, and a bilingual paper survey for primary aged children, which was completed at school, with 36 responses.