Riverside Community Health Project Launches Five Year Strategic Plan

We are delighted to share our (not so) new Strategic Plan with you.  It has been ready for a while now but we wanted to take time to discuss it fully internally before sending it to the many people and organisations with whom we collaborate.

The plan lays out six strategic objectives we will work towards between now and 2028, which are to:

1. Support families to enable their children to have the best possible start in life
2. Assist adults to counter the disadvantages they and their families experience
3. Facilitate women coming together to explore and influence the factors affecting their lives
4. Maintain Carnegie Building’s role as an accessible community hub for local residents and organisations
5. Work with local residents to achieve positive change through community action
6. Support community members to combat isolation, improve wellbeing and improve community cohesion

The first four are a continuation of objectives we have been working towards for many years now.  The last two may seem new but in reality they reflect Riverside’s values and way of working. We know people living in a community are the ones best placed to drive positive change at community level.  Riverside wants to work alongside local residents in bringing out the changes important to them.

This Strategic Plan is the outcome of months of hard work by “the Strategy Development Group” made up of Riverside trustees and staff.  This group organised lots of activities, such as talking through what community development means to Riverside and renewing our commitment to community development.  We pulled together all the information we could find on what research has already been done on the West End of Newcastle as well as updating our knowledge of what other groups and organisations are doing.  Most importantly, the Strategy Development Group organised a series of conversations with community members, including those that take part in Riverside activities.  All of this work makes us confident that we have chosen the best objectives we possibly could to fit what the community wants and needs from Riverside.

All of this work is contained in the plan, which is available for download here: Riverside Strategic Plan Final

If you are interested in discussing the plan further or have ideas for joint work we could do towards these objectives, feel free to contact our Chief Executive, Kate Mukungu at kate@riversidechp.org.uk