ReCreating Our Community

Crown Connects are a charity covering the Crown and Hill area in Central Inverness. They started as an emergency response to the COVID pandemic. From there, they have developed a community fridge, started a community orchard by handing out fruit trees to residents of the Crown and Hill area, and most recently held a community engagement event. The focus of the community cupboard is to help reduce waste and lower their carbon footprint.

They were one of the first groups I met when I started as a development officer at the Hub, all the way back in September 2021 where they held an event in collaboration with Eden Project Communities, Scotland Roadshow: Inverness. We had a walk around the Crown and Hill area in Inverness, exploring ideas for new projects, and seeing existing projects including an urban garden, and street planters. It was great to meet up in person, and really helped kickstart my imagination and a great opportunity to introduce the Hub.

Crown Connects were the first group to come forward for Hub seed funding, looking to carry out a community engagement event. I first started meeting with Crown Connects on a regular basis in January of 2022. The group knew they wanted to hold a community engagement event after circulating a survey to the community gathering ideas for what residents thought about the area, and what they would like to see. High on the agenda was active travel, and community food growing spaces.

It was so exciting to be involved in a community engagement event, with so many kind and creative people, with plenty of ideas of how to draw the community in and fun activities to do on the day. After a couple of meetings, the date was decided for Saturday the 26th of March. I was on hand to discuss any ideas and to support the group through the planning and delivery of the event. I really wanted the team at Crown Connects to drive forward their own ideas and help play an advisory role. One thing we decided early on was to create a large map of the Crown and Hill area so the community could visually reimagine how it could look.

Crown Connects were keen to get the local schools involved, and we were able to provide some extra resource for the primary 1 class at Crown Primary School to carry out a project to capture their favourite places around the area.

I got to work sourcing a community engagement toolkit for the hub and each of our development officers, which included polaroid cameras and plenty of film to hand over to the primary 1 class and Crown Primary so we could see how Crown looks from their eyes. Marion at Crown Connects arranged some press photos and the event, along with some primary school children was featured in the Inverness Courier!

I worked on producing a big map of the Crown, for the community to place on their ideas, good points, and bad points about the area and what they would like to see in the future. I also produced a large version of the Place Standard with plenty of dot stickers for people to come along and give different ratings to how they felt about the different themes such as traffic and parking, public transport, and identity and belonging.

Crown Connects did a fantastic job reaching out to other community groups in Inverness to come along to the community engagement event. This included The Libertie Project, who are coming to the end of their Climate Challenge Funding, Incredible Edible Inverness, Clachworks, Circus Artspace, Hi-Bike Inverness, Partnerships for Wellbeing, Culduthel Community Woods, Inverness RSPB Wildlife Explorers Group, and Spokes for Folks.

The event was held on the grounds of the newly refurbished WASPS Inverness Creative Academy building. It was a beautiful day, with loads of chatting about the area and connecting with some of the groups that were there. So many great ideas were shared, and it was so inspiring to see so many different community groups in Inverness coming along to support each other, with a shared vision of a climate friendly Inverness.

The main question from Crown Connects to the attendees: How good is our place?