Community Renewal Training & Consultancy has led peer research, evaluation and learning partner work across the UK. Unlike typical evaluators, we are only interested in learning roles in which there is exploration of system-change, the role of trust/relationships or a genuine focus on poverty/inequity. Our most recent case study is leading the learning partnership for BBC Children in Need’s investment in 250 youth organisations in rural, island and coastal communities.

In seventeen different neighbourhoods over as many years Community Renewal Trust has led community visioning. We also offer support to organisations to develop and deliver community visioning – most recently for the Nuclear Development Agency Allerdale Community Partnership.

Community engagement is the specific expertise of the whole of the wider Community Renewal Trust charity – using engagement in door knocking, community events, consultation meetings and community visioning conferences. We have experience delivering community engagement as a service (e.g. Our Place Ardrossan), training staff in community engagement (e.g. with City of Edinburgh Council) and developing community engagement strategies (e.g. with NHS Grampian)

We have a specific model of Listening Conversations which we use for community engagement where the objective is to turn engagement into long term casework. We have training in this methodology.

In addition to bespoke consultancy in community visioning and community engagement, we offer in-person training and also online training course in community engagement.

Our own high-level strategy and community strategies are built on the International Futures Forum (IIF) version of the Three Horizons process – reflecting that our founding chairman also founded IIF.

Our senior facilitators offer Three Horizons training and strategy planning sessions as a service and regularly deploy this expertise.

Community Renewal Trust have several successful examples of designing, developing and delivering peer research, peer coaching and working with people with lived experience of poverty and health inequalities.

A recent example is work in partnership with Heriot Watt University in 2024 training a cohort of 10 me facing health inequity to research health needs and barriers in their BAME community.

Other examples include delivering several Health Issues in the Community programmes in a variety of local authorities for adults with health issues or young people – in this our HIIC model peer researchers are trained then go door-to-door and use community events to get to know their neighbours and gather insights into their views on health and the social determinants of health in their local area.

We have specific expertise bringing together neighbourhood networks of community organisations and services.

We have done this in contexts including creating the Our Place Ardrossan partnerships and Bellsmyre which both resulted in a new community development trust forming to take forward this work.

A further example is in Edinburgh where we created and host a hyper-local community wealth building alliance with 11 members serving an area with just 4000 residents. Separately we host a coordinator post for the R2 network in North Edinburgh (albeit that this work was led by alternate organisations).

In total we have over 91 organisations formally engaging with our local networks and hubs including through collocation agreement, memorandum of understanding or other partnership models.

We have specific experiencing managing the allocation process (and award, monitoring, and compliance) for funding of community grants to local community projects. We have led this five times in different local areas - totalling over £5m in awards to over 34 awards.

We have separately managed sub-grants to dozens of partners for grants between £500 and £650,000.

Our unique approach is to embed a more community-empowered approach to this and manage funds in line with our values of trust, trusting, learning, strengths, prevention and transformation.

Our team at Community Renewal Training and Consultancy includes expert facilitators with decades experience delivering many hundreds of focus groups, community conferences, community forums, workshops and other meetings.

We have a particular expertise in delivering action learning sets, action learning-based workshops, Place Standard and Three Horizons meetings.