Focusing on our values - a look ahead to 2022

It is January, time for New Year’s resolutions, or as I heard mentioned today, time to decide ‘what you would like to gift yourself this year’. This seems a much more positive way of looking at it, and after the last two years we could all do with a daily treat – whether it is creating more space for together time, learning time or me time.

Someone once told me that they tried to live their life by ‘values’ not ‘goals’, which negates the concept of a new year’s resolution all together, but may be a far healthier concept - especially as recently our plans and goals have needed to be flexible to overcome the challenges of the pandemic.

At Community Chesterfield we have goals based around the number of ‘meaningful connections’ we make between the University of Derby and community organisations, the number of hours of training we deliver, or the number of students we place. However, over the last two and a half years we have found measuring by numbers doesn’t represent the impact we are having.

This spring a major project for us will be working on our evaluation to better understand the impact that this project has had on all those who have participated - students, university staff members, voluntary sector groups, service users etc. We not only want to understand our impact better, but also learn how we could improve and meet your needs in the future. We will therefore be contacting you all shortly to better understand the effect the project has had.

So far the project has shown that cross sector collaboration, when it meets the needs of participants, has a hugely positive impact and if funding allows, we want to explore this further by seeking the most effective touchpoints for creating positive cross-sector relationships.

To this end, we plan to continue to deliver objectives around training and facilitation, shared learning and meaningful connections and we hope to recruit a three-year PHD student who will measure the impact of the cross-sector working through these touchpoints.

As we have got to know our stakeholders better, we have become increasingly aware that the model we have begun to create with the university could be replicated to draw in resources from the private sector, which we are also beginning to explore. We know that the voluntary and community sector groups often don’t have the capacity to build cross sector relationships and we are well-placed to initiate and support this journey. We believe that we can help you to strengthen communities across Derbyshire by bringing different sectors and individuals together and encouraging the sharing of skills, knowledge and resource.

And back to values. Ours are to be: Open, Inclusive, Trusting, Developing and Community focused. Feel free to get in touch and tell us how we are doing.

We are very much looking forward to working with you all in 2022 and wish you all the very best for a healthy, happy, successful year ahead.