The resource pack has been prepared to respond to an emerging difficulty faced in a number of areas in Scotland: community opposition to development which is designed to accommodate vulnerable people, specifically homeless people. Such opposition can delay projects, add costs, or cause ongoing problems of management. At times, it can prevent projects going ahead altogether.

Opposition is not always bad. There are sometimes legitimate reasons for opposition and, where resolved, this can often result in better development in the long term. However, where tension is generated as a result of prejudice, or flaws in the process of dialogue between communities and developers, then that benefits no-one.

How to use this pack

The initial prompt for this pack is the development of accommodation for homeless people. However, we believe that much of what is in it will apply across a range of services for many different excluded groups and even, on occasion, to the development of mainstream social housing. Development of other accommodation which is high density, such as student accommodation, may find echoes in the pack. We expect that the main users of the pack will be staff of local authorities and registered social landlords and other voluntary organisations providing accommodation or services to excluded groups. We also anticipate that some providers of commercial services will find it useful. Throughout the pack we refer to you as 'developers'.

This pack is intended to support you to generate more positive and productive relationships with communities. It will help you:

• communicate the facts about the planned development clearly
• secure community support for the planned development
• reduce conflict with communities
• achieve consensus on the way forward.

Ideally, you will have the opportunity to build processes for effective community engagement into the overall process of developing the accommodation. We know that in many cases this will not be possible, or that you will be picking this pack up at a point where you have already begun the development and are encountering problems. We appreciate that the accommodation of the type this pack refers to is often small scale without the dedicated budgets given to community engagement in large-scale regeneration projects.

The pack has been designed to support you to plan for incorporating adequate and appropriate community engagement processes into new developments, and to troubleshoot community engagement processes that are already underway.

Contents

The pack is in three sections; Understanding the Fundamentals, Problems and Solutions, and Resources.

Understanding the fundamentals

This section will give you an understanding of:

• why community engagement is important
• what community engagement is and is not
• why community engagement is often unsatisfactory for developers and communities
• how the national standards can help improve community engagement.

This understanding will then allow you to read the troubleshooting section and identify where and how community engagement went wrong from a more informed perspective.

Problems and solutions 

This section provides a long list of problems for developers identified through the research for this pack. It outlines the possible causes of the problems and suggests solutions. It then directs the reader to the particular parts of the section on Resources that are likely to be most useful.

The resources 

This section provides examples and tools to help you implement improved community engagement. Throughout this section, the hypothetical development of 'New Bell Street' is used to provide an example of how some of the resources may be used.

Examples

A recurring example is used throughout the pack to show the development of a particular user involvement project:

New Bell Street - the example
Overall Objective: To address commitments in the homelessness strategy by providing direct access accommodation for up to 30 homeless single young people aged 16-25. The service will provide a stable environment for vulnerable, homeless, young people. It aims to provide them with support in achieving independent living skills. Through an associated service provided on site, clients will be supported to address any employability issues, including learning, addiction issues and 'soft' employability skills.

Other real examples from the research that informed this pack are provided throughout the text to illuminate particular points. These examples have been anonymised to prevent identification of any particular organisations or communities.