A New Community Strategy for Wychavon

Wychavon’s Community Strategy  (597.64 KB), ‘Shaping the future together’, contains the vision and priorities for the Wychavon district from 2007 to 2010.  It sets out how the organisations involved in preparing it are working together to improve the quality of life for everyone who lives in, works in or visits the district.

Wychavon is already a good place to live, with beautiful countryside, a rich historic heritage, low crime and life expectancy higher than the UK average.  But there are challenges too, including an annual shortage of affordable housing, recovering from the recent major flooding and limited transport options in rural parts of the district.

Agencies from across the public, private, community and voluntary sectors, plus the district’s three Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) have come together to develop this plan to make Wychavon an even better place for everyone.

We’re aiming high for our communities.  Our vision for Wychavon is a safe, green, healthy and beautiful district that is a vibrant and creative place for everyone to live, work and visit.

The strategy follows the same themes that all the Worcestershire community strategies are using:

• Communities that are safe and feel safe
• A better environment – for today and tomorrow
• Economic success that is shared by all
• Improving health and well-being
• Meeting the needs of children and young people
• Stronger communities: this theme covers a range of issues including, housing, inclusion, leisure, culture and transport.

These are also the thematic blocks of Worcestershire’s Local Area Agreement

For each of the six themes the strategy contains:

• a set of shared priorities, or outcomes that we’ve developed from an in-depth analysis of a range of intelligence about the district, recent market research and consultation.  Sources include:
  • Worcestershire Citizens’ Panel surveys;
  • completed Parish Plans;
  • the Wychavon health profile;
  • research commissioned by Wychavon District Council and the South Worcestershire Crime and Disorder Audit.  
• examples of some things we are already doing to contribute to the priorities, which partners on the Community Plan Core Group identified through a stocktake  (85.57 KB) of their current activities and business plans.  
• partnership actions that we will commit to deliver over the life time of the plan, plus other ideas about ways we can work together to contribute to the delivery of the shared priorities.  
• measures of success.  That will help us track the impact of the strategy over its lifetime and beyond.  We will monitor and report on these on an annual basis.

Our successful ‘Piecing the future together’ event in September 2006 was a crucial step in shaping this strategy.  The event brought together members of the Core Group, Wychavon LSPs, public, private, community and voluntary organisations to discuss the future of the district.  Representatives from the three LSPs spoke about a range of projects delivered by the partnerships over the last few years.  Participants heard about the key priorities  (83.59 KB) and during workshops sessions, people discussed ways of working together to tackle issues such as road safety in rural areas, meeting housing needs, affordable warmth, walking for health initiatives, providing more activities for young people and migrant workers.

We launched Wychavon’s Community Strategy at a partnership event in October 2007.  At the event partners made a public commitment to delivering the Community Strategy by signing up to the shared priorities.  They were also invited to commit to working with others on taking forward some of the ideas for action set out in the plan.  We are now developing some of these into more concrete actions to include in an action plan to support the delivery of this strategy.

We will monitor progress on delivering the actions contained in the strategy and supporting action plan every six months.   We will monitor progress against the success measures on an annual basis as far as possible.

We will produce an annual progress report for residents and partners, setting out our progress on delivering actions and tracking the measures of success over the lifetime of the plan.  

Further Information

For more information contact:

Cherrie Mansfield
Strategy & Communications
Telephone: 01386 565508 between 9am-5pm, Monday - Friday
Email: cherrie.mansfield@wychavon.gov.uk