Resources for conducting Community Audits
Download the main audit document
I have had the chance recently both through paid work and college placements to conduct two separate community audits in Glasgow. To even begin to know how to go about this was a hard task - there wan't much material to hand to teach myself what to do. Even when I went to the Mission 21 conference, Bishop Graham Cray was saying that there is an urgent need for materials in this area to assist church planters, and the best Fran Beckett could do was point me to the Shaftesbury website, which has some good stuff but by no means all you could need. I'd like this thread to become a place where UE Associates can share good practice about Community Auditing, both in terms of experiences and in terms of hard and fast principles. To this end I have also posted a number of documents that I have created to give folk an idea of what things can be done. Apologies if this is very Scottish focussed, but perhaps someone can do the equivalent for down south. I now have two example audits for people as well. I've posted the one I've done of Laurieston (the sixth most deprived community in Scotland) as an example. Hope some of this stuff helps someone! (Jan 2nd 2007) I've just found this page on the ACPI website which deals with this issue and offers some resources to help:
A story about God's favour
Paul Ede
While conducting an audit on behalf of a church in Possil park, I discovered that the offices of the local Community Planning Partnership was just round the corner. The CPP is the body responsible in that locality for disbursing Scottish Executive funding for regeneration of deprived communities (as identified by Communities Scotland, the agency responsible for managing these funds). So I went with the assistant minister to meet Margaret Daly last week. Margaret is the gatekeeper of the CPP in that area. It turns out that she was a Christian who had thought that our shop-front church was actually a loan company, even though she had driven past it every day for 6 months. She was immediately intested to find out that this church had a thriving work with local addicts and quite a reputation with other service providers in the area for connecting with people that were otherwise "off the radar". Margaret immediately offered the chance to apply for money from the Executive to help us conduct a feasibility study into our project. She even offered to give us a list of consultants to employ who would be sympathtic to the church's Christian ethos. This is exactly what was needed at this stage as we set out to establish the existing work as a fundable and sustainable project to connect with the most vulnerable members of the local community. Just one visit has established the church on the local map of Government funding and raised its profile immeasurably. A great result from an exploratory audit, along with a bit of brass-neck rooted in prayer and a personal visit. Be encouraged!