If you are already a member of a friends’ group, you might find it useful to be able to contact other friends groups in your area to share experiences, identify funding and raise the profile of your activities and aims. By joining together with like-minded groups you might be able to make a louder voice for parks and green spaces in your area.
What are the reasons for setting up a friends’ forum?
- Sharing information
- Promoting networking between groups
- Providing support to friends’ groups
- Providing an umbrella group for the development of new friends’ groups
- Providing a context within which groups can work
- Creating a stronger voice for parks and green spaces
- Producing best practice
Successful forums can benefit both park friends’ groups and local authority officers.
How can a friends’ forum help park friends groups?
- Sharing experiences/expertise on
- Constitutions
- Organisation
- Events/insurance
- Issues/conflicts
- Funding
- Giving support
- Sharing resources especially where groups have low capacity
- Giving a louder voice to issues/get issues onto the political agenda
- Encouraging the development of new friends and community groups
- Mentoring
- Sharing information, eg a joint newsletter
- Providing a platform to work from
- Bringing decision makers to the table
- Promoting devolved management
- Exchanging ideas
- Encouraging a partnership approach
- Encouraging positive action
- Applying for joint funding
- Auditing and providing for training needs
- Helping to build bridges between groups and local authority officers
- Giving new groups a sense of belonging
- Giving new groups a context within which to work
How can a friends’ forum help local authority officers
- Acting as a collective voice for friends’ groups
- Raising the profile of parks in the political agenda
- Raising public awareness of parks within a political context
- May help to safeguard budget provision
- May be able to engage elected members
- Strategically representing local grass roots issues
- Cutting across other services
- Encouraging the development of more friends’ groups or community group activity generally
- Bringing in additional funds or protecting existing
- Helping to manage expectations and raise understanding
- Helping to engage hard to reach groups
- Providing a focus for communication and consultation
- Getting involved with consultation or data collection
- Providing ideas, concerns, compliments and thanks
How local authority officers can encourage the formation of friends’ forums
- Facilitating the running of joint events
- Providing or training in specialist skills, such as
- Grant advice
- Managing meetings
- Finances
- Risk assessment
- Health and safety
- First aid
- Promoting best practice
- Encouraging visits to other groups or areas
- Facilitating the celebration of success together, eg a party for friends’ groups
- Providing information and expertise
- Providing resources including in kind assistance
- Supporting development of the forum, by providing:
- Venues
- Administrative support – printing, postage
- Database/it support
- Linkages/networks
- Events
- Help with funding bids
- Helping sustain or rejuvenate the forum
- Promoting awareness and understanding of their problems
- Facilitating networking days of local groups
- Producing resources and documentation for common usage, eg model constitution
- By telling friends group that there is a forum or that one is forming and encouraging them to join.
Reproduced with permission of North West Parks Friends Forum
