Having conversations that matter - September update

Our Community Action Group came together again

It was great to once again bring together members of our Community Action Group. The group , chaired by Dr Tom Powell, Innovation Manager at our RIIC Hub, brings together people with lived experiences, in addition to those who work in health, housing, our three local authorities, public sector, education and the third sector.

It’s really important that we hear as many voices as possible in our Assessments. We reflected on the groups of people we have spoken with, but also who else we need to reach. Our CAG Group members have diverse and wide areas of knowledge and experience, so were able to suggest the most meaningful ways to engage with different groups across our region.

Telling the full story

As our work on the assessment involves data gathering and hearing voices from our community, it’s important we bring both together to tell the full story. As part of this meet up, we discussed the geographical areas we will be targeting with data gathering, and where we also need to focus our engagement activities.   The areas we are looking at, are:

• Merthyr Tydfil
• Rhondda Fach
• Rhondda Fawr
• Bridgend East
• Bridgend West
• Bridgend North
• Cynon
• Taf Ely

At the end of our meet up, we discussed how we can work together as partners in the best possible way. Organisations across the region are well connected with our communities, so we have developed toolkits to use that will enable meaningful conversations that get to the heart of issues.

Our CAG group will meet again in November.

In This Together workshop

We were pleased to see membership for our engagement group (set up to support meaningful engagement with our communities) increase by 130% in September!  We now have 60 members from across the region involved.

As mentioned above, we developed toolkits to help partners have conversations about health, social care & wellbeing priorities with communities. To support this work we launched a series of workshops called ‘In This Together’.

These workshops aim to share advice and top tips on how to run successful engagement activities. It will also be an opportunity for us to share our learnings and join up, so we can ensure as many voices as possible are represented in our assessments, workplans and beyond.

Our first workshop took place in September. In this session we explored the importance of meaningful conversations, and looked at language & jargon busting & supporting people before, during and following a conversation.

It was great to have so many people from across the region joining this session, and feeling so passionate about advocating for people who live in their communities.

You can see the presentation here.