The Community Signature

The Community Signature has been created as an engaging way of informing the regeneration strategies of local authorities and others involved in community planning. 

Currently being deployed in several parts of the UK by local authorities, community planning partnerships and urban regeneration companies, the Community Signature enables different groups within a community to highlight community strengths, opportunities and challenges, resulting in better engagement, community generated development plans and improved service targeting.

The Community Signature has demonstrated that it helps the community, its residents and their partner agencies in a number of ways :

• It describes the current capacity of the community to capitalise on planned change
• It highlights individual and comparative community conditions, prioritising areas for action
• It informs engagement and development strategies by enhancing understanding of issues and talking points across the community
• It helps to stimulate collaboration, building opportunities for stakeholders to discuss development needs and experiences
• It provides a focus for shared learning and development, generating comparative data that helps to identify areas of common need

The process of engaging residents in discussion about their community, then working with them to help build the capacity of that community, has been identified as a significant contributor to social and economic vitality.

The Community Signature empowers individuals and groups to identify their own priorities and generates 'bottom up' data to support regeneration and development plans. This helps to develop focussed action plans, identifying areas where an agency is best placed to take the lead in capacity building or regeneration initiatives, and where it can best play a facilitating role to support the efforts of others.

Contact Us to find out more about running a Community Signature programme.