Examples

Overview

Ketso started its life as a tool for community development in Southern Africa, and has since gone on to be used in a range of community planning settings. Ketso is featured as a method on CommunityPlanning.net.

For more insight into how Ketso can be used to create effective community engagement, please take a look at our Ketso in Community Planning Video and see our sample workshop plans, which have been developed through the experiences below.

This section includes:

New! Renfrewshire's Community Planning Conference
Fellside Forum - Kendal
Moston Vale and North Manchester
Ketso in Community Development in the Middle East
Working together for the Common Good in Brighton and Hove
Chester Parish

NEW! Renfrewshire's Community Planning Conference

Renfrewshire’s Annual Community Planning Conference gives residents a voice in the Council’s future activities. The 10th Annual Conference in Sept. 2011 attracted 458 individuals, community groups and charitable organisations. In 2011, for the first time, Renfrewshire Community Planning Partnership used Ketso for gathering input into their future action plans.

You can download the report from the conference, including a description of how Ketso was used and an analysis of the results, here.

You can download a brief PowerPoint presentation about the use of Ketso in Renfrewshire here. You can see the workshop plan used for the nine themes of the conference here.

There were 1.5 hour interactive discussions using Ketso at several times in the programme over 3 days and 6 events throughout the area. Renfrewshire’s own staff were trained to facilitate the discussions. Ketso was used to gather input on 9 themes, as well as to collate the key messages and priorities from the participants.

Feedback from the event was very positive. Comments included:

I was pleasantly surprised when the Ketso workshop format worked very well; I felt confident enough to voice my opinions.
I found this year’s workshops to be a much better concept, much more involvement from whole group.

This graph shows responses given to the evaluation question:

Do you agree that the workshop allowed participants to work together, share ideas and be creative?

"Using Ketso during this year's Renfrewshire Community Planning Conference Events gave everyone a chance to contribute and voice their opinions without anyone dominating the discussion. Community planning is all about engagement and participation and Ketso supported people thinking things through and developing ideas in a short period of time. Ketso made it easier to manage the events in terms of reduced resources used, a quick set up and easy clean up. The majority of participants agreed that this workshop format gave everyone a voice and took the pressure off facilitators."
Kasia Owczarek, Chief Executive's Service, Renfrewshire Council

In January 2012, Ketso held a workshop entitled 'Learning from Renfrewshire’s Community Planning Conference success’ at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA). To find out more, and to see the results of the dialogue on the future delivery of public services, click here.

Fellside Forum

Community Planning: Kendal’s Fellside Forum leads the way?

Chris Lumb & Fellside Forum

Residents and councillors in Kendal’s Fellside and Greenside wards came together in two workshops to discuss and agree their priorities for action in their local community, and a follow on workshop to develop a snow and ice contigency plan for the area. Fellside_Forum_Article_1

The first workshop was organised by the community group Fellside Forum and facilitated by Dr Joanne Tippett. Its aim was to identify what residents valued about where they lived, what detracted from it and how it could be improved. Finally residents agreed the actions that they would take, or would seek to get done in partnership with the Councils. The Forum and workshop are a good example of how community-led planning can contribute to locality working such as South Lakeland’s new Local Area Partnerships.
Fellside_Forum_Article_1 An initial workshop was held in March 2010. Since then the Forum has been working closely with local councillors and council officers to address issues and concerns identified at that workshop. This second workshop, held on 25 September, reviewed the achievements to date and focused in on the priority actions. These included:

The Forum will:

Extend its network of Fellside and Greenside volunteers to organise litter clean ups, to promote a buddy system and to look after neighbours (learning from the successful scheme in Greenside). It will encourage volunteer residents to act as liaison contacts with other residents, the Forum and Councils, on behalf of designated areas within Fellside and Greenside.
Secure funding to create interpretation panels in the area to highlight the history of Fellside and Greenside and draw attention to areas of interest. This would be an extension of the widely acclaimed network of panels in the town centre.

In partnership with the Councils, the Forum will:

Continue to help manage Serpentine Woods
Take action to address the problems of litter on Fellside and Greenside
Organise an evening presentation and workshop with the Conservation Area Officer and the Civic Society. This would aim at a better understanding of the interests of the Conservation Area and would identify community-led projects to enhance the Area and look for possibilities for funding for these projects.
Develop a plan that ensures that everyone has safe access into Kendal in the event of heavy snow and ice in order to avoid a repeat of the access difficulties caused by dangerous conditions last winter.

The Forum will seek urgent action by the Council to repair the damaged speed bumps, ramps and surface of Queens Road which are damaging vehicles, dangerous to drive over and increase traffic noise.

Chairman of the Fellside Forum Chris Lumb said “Fellside and Greenside residents greatly value the area in which they live. Through this workshop we have identified key actions that we can take ourselves or working in partnership with the Councils, to retain and enhance the value of the area. In a time of increasing pressures on public services it is even more important that we do this”. Fellside_Forum

Fellside Forum are showing how residents, councillors and the Councils can work in partnership to deliver more and better outcomes through community-led planning and action”

Feedback from the workshop was very positive, with several participants saying they were amazed at how much they had accomplished in the short period of time. Participants felt that the interactive toolkit helped them to ‘see a bigger picture’, and enabled them to ‘hear other people's views and ideas’.

A second workshop brought together residents to develop a plan for dealing with snow and ice, an area highlighted as a priority in the first workshop.

You can download the results:

Moston Vale and North Manchester

Dr. Joanne Tippett, with Prof. John Handley, Joe Ravetz (University of Manchester) and Walter Menzies (Mersey Basin Campaign), Research funded by the ESRC and Mersey Basin Campaign

Harpurhey

Between February and June 2003, Ketso was used to encourage dialogue and decision-making in a programme of workshops with local residents and public/private sector organisations to develop future visions for the Irk Valley, North Manchester. This was part of Joanne Tippett's PhD research, based at the University of Manchester, in partnership with the Mersey Basin Campaign and the Irk Valley Project. The aim was to encourage community and stakeholder participation in planning.

Over 50 stakeholders took part in the programme, ranging from the Forestry Commission and Environment Agency, to employees of local businesses, community groups and individual residents. This work led to the production of a strategic vision for North Manchester, as well as a landscape plan for Moston Vale (a 22 hectare site).

The enthusiasm generated by this community involvement contributed to the decision by the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) to fund the site’s £1.7 million environmental regeneration via the £59m Newlands programme. Moston Vale was the first site to be revitalised through Newlands – a unique intelligence-led environmental programme led by the NWDA and Forestry Commission that has been citied by the UK Sustainable Development Strategy as an ‘innovative and integrated approach to tackling inherited degradation’. In 2004, Newlands Project Officer, Chris Waterfield commented: 'The proposals that have come forward for Moston Vale seem to have a clearer orientation, and are based on a better sense of the existing economic, social and ecological capital, than others being developed without the benefit of this process'.

Download an article about the project here (courtesy of the Mersey Basin Campaign Archive.

Download a 2008 report commissioned by Natural Economy Northwest about the impacts of the Moston Vale project here.

Download the project reports for Moston Vale and Irk Valley.

The full PhD developed from this research can be downloaded, chapter by chapter, from this page.

Ketso in Community Development in the Middle East

Anas Tawileh (Project Consultant with the International Development Research Centre IDRC)

The ICT4D Middle East planning workshop was held in Amman, Jordan early in 2008 in order to identify local issues in five countries in the Middle East (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Yemen) within four thematic areas:

Women participation
Education and Employability
Governance
Community and Local Development

The 31 participants came from a range of sectors. They included researchers, practitioners and representatives from NGOs and the civil society. The age varied widely, between 23 – 64. Participants reacted very positively to the kits and used them very effectively.

Download the full report here.

Ketso is also being used in Universities on the West Bank and Gaza to develop 'Lifelong Learning in Palestine' through the European TEMPUS programme. Click here to find out more about GRAMNet's use of Ketso in research and community development.

Working together for the Common Good in Brighton and Hove

Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce and the Business and Enterprise Team at the University of Sussex
hosted a Ketso workshop bringing together twenty-six participants from a range of local companies, universities and the voluntary sector.

Participants discussed ways to work together for the common good in Brighton and Hove. The workshop was designed to allow plenty of time for delegates to learn from each other. A report summarises the ideas developed by participants in the exercise looking at the Brighton and Hove area.

Download summary report here
Download full set of wokrshop results here

Chester Parish

Ann Barlow (Researcher Development Manager at Manchester University and Licensed Lay Minister at St Oswald’s Church, Lower Peover, Cheshire)

All Anglican churches in the Chester diocese had in 2009 been asked to establish a Growth Action Plan (GAP) for the coming five years. At the time, Lower Peover Church identified the following as its key goals for GAP:

opportunities for people to grow in faith
a building fit for purpose
a church living the gospel

One of the initial actions identified by Lower Peover Church was to hold a parish weekend away, giving space for members of the congregation to think about the goals of the GAP and to identify further actions which could be taken back to the Parochial Church Council for ratification and implementation.

The weekend took place at in October 2010, at Rydal Hall in the Lake District – a Christian conference centre. 16 members of the church signed up for the weekend – a self selected group with a range of roles and connections to the church. While some were church officials, others held no particular responsibility. The group was made up of individuals from a variety of secular backgrounds, ranging from university academics to members of the farming community and included two children.

Ketso was an excellent tool for this activity. The groups taking part were very diverse. They included people with disabilities, people for whom English is a second language and who are not confident in their use and understanding of English, as well as one nine year old child (the other child having chosen not to participate). Everyone was able and willing to make a contribution and there was a great sense of listening as people were given time to present their own thoughts. The groups were facilitated by a non-participant, and the establishment of “rules” at the beginning contributed to a sense of game which engaged our youngest participant very effectively. It was interesting to see, as the maps grew, how gaps in provision became clearly identified through the visual “big picture” so ideas for improvement could become quite focused.