Future Developments

We are excited to update you all on some future developments for the project. Many of you will remember some work we delivered during the pandemic called, “Your Life, Your Chesterfield” where we brought people together to dream and envision what they would like their town to look like into the future. Through the delivery of this, we learned lots of new things, for example, how many passionate and enthusiastic people there are locally wanting to make change happen and how challenging it can be to bring about these changes.

Last year, we met a local resident called Clare Gage at Social Fuse 2022, organised by our good friend Ann from Kakou Technologies. Clare, had, before the pandemic been working on a similar project called Create Change Chesterfield and so a collaboration was born. Over the past year we have been exploring how to give communities a louder voice to shape the future of their neighbourhoods, overcome the challenges to making local change possible and working with stakeholders. We are delighted that we now have a project plan for which we are seeking funding for delivery to begin in the spring of 2024.

Clare Gage’s previous work uses creativity to bring people together and the creative process to explore new ideas for building positive futures. at Community Chesterfield we are excited to incorporate new ways of working. You can read more about Clare’s work at Create Change Chesterfield .

Other supporters of this work include: Chesterfield Borough Council, The University of Derby, Active Derbyshire and Junction Arts, if you would like to be involved, get in touch!

Ideas which have come from participants at previous events have included: Examples of local peoples change maker ideas have included:

•Making local democracy more participatory,

•A needed cycle path connection,

•Public transport improvements,

•Community book exchanges

•Improved local youth provision

This new project will create social infrastructure, build relationships and provide training, support, signposting and community connections to facilitate individuals to become change makers and make their ideas reality.

We are ambitious for Chesterfield and believe that it is vital that communities have a voice in shaping the future. We hope that this work will forge new connections, drive positive impact and build love for our town.