Posted on February 4th, 2010 by Ellie Brodie in Project news
Tagged as: local stakeholders, participatory mapping
2 Comments
ShareThisThe project team has been busy in each of the case study areas, with the first meetings of the local stakeholder groups taking place in Enfield, Leeds and Suffolk in January 2009. Each local stakeholder group is made up of residents and practitioners/professionals from across the statutory and voluntary and community sectors who have an interest in – or responsibility for – participation in the area. The three local groups will help to guide and shape the research throughout the lifetime of the project and will meet every three months.
In each meeting, participants created visual maps of where participation happens in the case study area. These ‘activity maps’ identified both ‘sites’ of participation (e.g. Animal Rescue Centre) and different participatory activities or roles (e.g. Parent Governors). Apart from being a fun and engaging way for participants to get to know each other and the project better, the maps will provide invaluable data for the researchers – helping them to get to grips with the important ‘hot spots’ of local participation where they can carry out further research.
Here are a few photos to give you an idea of the mapping sessions….
Enfield - map in the making
Leeds - the finished product
Suffolk - getting started
The mapping sessions in Leeds provided a really interesting insight to the variety of activity going on across the city. As well as the maps themselves illustrating the breadth of activity, the discussion between participants whilst creating the maps has really helped us understand stakeholders’ perspectives of what participation is, and what it isn’t.
The research team now has a greater awareness of the range of local initiatives at neighbourhood level, as well as ongoing city-wide initiatives, many of which will be a part of the Leeds Year of Volunteering 2010. It was always going to be a challenge for the group to map an area as physically great as Leeds, and I think the local neighbourhood mapping sessions which we will be conducting soon will offer a really interesting contrast.
I’m looking forward to facilitating the local area mapping sessions in Suffolk next month. Although I joined the project shortly after the initial session with the local stakeholder group, I have used mapping exercises in previous work.
What I like about the map format is its flexibility: maps can be literal or metaphoric; they can document geographic locations, people’s experience of places, and people’s feelings about places; they can use existing maps, be created from scratch on paper or the ground, or involve people moving around a room. Once created, maps can prompt conversations that shift between the tangible and the conceptual, and between the actual and the possible. This can be really useful in projects seeking to both understand a current situation and explore how that situation might be improved.