Community Engagement
Learn about how our team works with communities and stakeholders utilising our Enquiry by Design process to facilitate effective and continuous engagement to collaborate on any new or existing plans for the future of a city, town or neighbourhood, breaking down silos and bringing all groups to the table for their voices to be heard.
Sark Community Engagement
In consideration of a strategy for long-term stewardship for the island, The King’s Foundation was invited by the Seigneur of Sark and appointed to engage with the community to conduct an early-stage assessment of the current situation.
We employed our Enquiry by Design process, which seeks to facilitate effective and continuous engagement with stakeholders and community members to collaborate on the future of their place. Through various activities and conversations, the community have been consulted on where they see strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for Sark, and this has informed our appraisal that seeks to assess across all aspects of natural, social, financial and built capital.
Thurrock Local plan
In 2020, The King’s Foundation was commissioned by Thurrock Borough Council to run a series of workshops and masterplan visioning exercises across nine settlements that the council had highlighted for possible growth. A series of Enquiry by Design workshops engaging landowners and community members were held for each settlement, and as such is a unique piece of early engagement in local plan making. The framework creates a spatial plan for 30,000 homes and was the result of 19 collaborative workshops with developers, landowners, stakeholders and council officers, along with 16 evening online public sessions. The output was nine comprehensive reports that have since formed part of Thurrock’s evidence base for their revised Local Plan.
A vision for Windsor
A temporary restriction of international travel during the Covid-19 pandemic exposed a lack of resilience in Windsor’s town centre, where the local economy had relied heavily on tourism for income. The Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead council enlisted us to undertake a stakeholder engagement process to comprehensively uncover the assets, challenges and opportunities, and to articulate a vision that could guide Windsor for its next 20 years. The Vision for Windsor, which evolved throughout the engagement process, was approved and adopted by the Royal Borough’s Cabinet in February 2023.
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
Throughout 2022, The King’s Foundation was engaged in a capacity-building role to support Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole’s FuturePlaces, a council-owned regeneration company, to work with stakeholders to identify potential strategies for several sites throughout Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. For each area, workshops were held that included the council teams, key business and community stakeholders, design consultants, and were jointly hosted by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole FuturePlaces and The King’s Foundation.
Glenarm Regeneration
The Foundation facilitated a three-day Enquiry by Design on behalf of Larne Borough Council to engage the local community. Through this process, a suggested masterplan was produced for the harbour area of the village coupled with a tourism strategy to help redefine and enhance interpretation. A new village centre was proposed on the site of an old industrial yard, which would become a new mixed use village square, with workshops supporting local skills and crafts, and a market showcasing the ‘Best of the Glens’. and every ward floor culminating in an open balcony.
Our approach
Enquiry by Design
Enquiry by Design (EbD) workshops are held to convene specialists from authorities and statutory bodies to work alongside local experts and members of the community to understand the complexities of a place or site, and to collaborate on designs and strategies. The participants share their respective expertise and, in the process of learning from one another, inform the design. We believe that effective and continuous community engagement in the planning process leads to greater community empowerment and ownership, which is essential for the success of a project or place.
Community Capital
The Community Capital Framework, a tool developed by The King’s Foundation, incorporates qualitative aspects of assessment across a diverse set of criteria, to inform a thorough analysis of a place or a community. This approach challenges planners and designers to incorporate not only built elements, but address natural, social and financial capital that contributes to the whole-system view of a successful community. More information can be found in our publications: Community Capital (2010) and The Value of Community: An Evidence Informed Development Model (2019).
Neighbourhood Planning
The King’s Foundation was selected to provide free planning advice to neighbourhood groups as part of the 2011 Localism Bill and the Communities and Neighbourhoods in Planning scheme. In total, we helped to pioneer 50 of the first neighbourhood plans in England.As a result of this experience of neighbourhood planning and delivery, we developed a free online tool called Beauty in My Back Yard (BIMBY) to guide communities through the process of developing neighbourhood plans focused on better housing design and delivery.
Take a look at some of our projects
