Planning for Real

During 2014 the Planning for Real Unit worked alongside partners from the Accord Group, Family Action and Birmingham City University to explore the social impact of Holiday Kitchen, a project which offers ‘Holiday learning, food and play for families who need it most’.

For many vulnerable and low income families, school holidays mean the disappearance of Free School Meals, regular social contact and play opportunities. This can result in financial, emotional, nutritional, safeguarding, educational and/or social challenges that have longer-term impacts.

Based on a simple formula of Holiday learning, food and play for families who need it most, Holiday Kitchen, pioneered by the Accord Group, works to address these holiday challenges in the target neighbourhoods.

In the Summer of 2014, Holiday Kitchen worked with local and national partners to co-deliver 2,300 activity days and meals to almost 300 participants across 11 sites in Birmingham, Sandwell and North Solihull.

The evaluation team explored the social impact of Holiday Kitchen in relation to its core objectives:

• Improved social inclusion and aspiration
• Improved family nutrition and well-being
• Reduced financial and emotional strain.

The Planning for Real Unit took the lead in designing bespoke evaluation tools and materials to use with the children and families who attended the Holiday Kitchen. The Planning for Real ethos is that techniques should be highly visual, tactile, participatory and community-led and this approach underpinned the design of the evaluation activities.

The Planning for Real Unit also carried out a ‘light-touch’ SROI analysis of one of the delivery venues in order to explore how investment has been returned upon in a specific section.

The conclusions of the evaluation indicate that Holiday Kitchen is an extremely effective programme for meeting the needs of low-income children and families during holiday periods and, relationally, in addressing the Child Poverty agenda laid out in the 2010 Child Poverty Act.

Based on the evaluation feedback from children, parents, staff and volunteers, key recommendations are made for supporting the expansion of Holiday Kitchen activities.

You can find out more about the Holiday Kitchen on the Accord Group website.

Early December saw Margaret Wilkinson, head of the PFR Unit, travel to Poland as part of our Leonardo Planning for Real Project.

Our Polish partner, Institute for Territorial Development (IRT), is a subsidiary unit of the Self Government of Lower Silesia which is located in the south – western part of Poland.

In Poland our partners are running two real-life projects in different towns. In the town of Levin Klodzki the project will focus on urban space revitalization, and in Bytom the focus will be on trialling the Planning for Real methodology to look at a specific area of the town.

In both towns groups of planning students attended workshops to be trained in the Planning for Real process and they, as local facilitators, will be actively involved in running the real life projects and the programmes of community engagement. Thephotos show the local facilitator workshops which took place in November 2014.

Margaret’s visit to Poland coincided with the early stages of the real-life projects. All day drop-in workshops took place in both towns where local residents and community groups were invited to have their say about their neighbourhoods and put forward their ideas and suggestions for the future. The PFR model proved popular with the communities and we look forward to hearing how these projects progress.

As part of her visit Margaret also gave a presentation about Planning for Real to a group of students from the Department of Architecture of the Cracovian Technical University and spoke at a conference on participatory urban planning which was organised by the Silesian Union of Municipalities and Provinces and TUP Katowice.

At the end of November Planning for Real consultant Gill Hutchinson visited Italy as part of our Leonardo Planning for Real project.

Our Italian partners are Euro Innovanet, a research and consultancy organisation based in Rome. Gill was supporting Marco, Mirella and Giovanni, the three Italian representatives who attended Planning for Real training in Birmingham in June this year to facilitate a two day training workshop for a group of local facilitators in Rome.

This group will play an active role in running the Italian real-life Planning for Real project which will focus on the redevelopment of a public square. The square which has been chosen is not currently widely used by local people and the project aims for the redesign of the garden area to make it more attractive and easy to maintain. Using Planning for Real tool and techniques for community engagement, local residents will be invited to have their say and to get involved in the redevelopment of the square.

Gill will offer our Italian partners ongoing mentoring support as they finalise their delivery plan for their real-life project.

To find out more please visit the Leonardo Planning for Real project website