Working across multiple tiers of local authorities to develop a hyper local vision for the town of Coleford

Executive Summary

The Innovate UK Net Zero Living programme aims to help local and regional authorities accelerate the transition to net zero. The cohort of 52 funded places across the UK delivered projects to overcome the non-technological barriers to delivering net zero in a place.

Involve, Forum for the Future, Ipsos and Quantum Strategy & Technology were appointed to support 28 local authorities with their work on various climate-related projects. 

In 2025, The Forest of Dean District Council partnered with Involve to develop a place-based citizens’ vision for a market town within the district. This citizen visioning project was designed to deliver meaningful community engagement tailored to a rural context and the areas expected transition to a unitary authority structure by 2028. Through this multi level council collaboration, the District Council aimed to realise its ambition of creating community-led climate action plans.

The unitary authority structure was integrated into the project design by the District Council inviting expression of interest from five local town councils. Coleford Town Council was ultimately chosen as the partner as they were uniquely well placed to collaborate and implement recommendations. 

20 members of the public worked together  to answer the question;

‘How can we create a happy and fair future for Coleford while working together to respond to the challenges of climate change?’

Over five deliberative sessions, members produced;

• A vision for a happy and fair future for Coleford, one that responds to the challenges of climate change while remaining grounded in what participants value most about their town.
• Nine co-developed action recommendations showing how residents, the District and Town Councils, businesses, and other local actors can work together to create the change needed towards the vision

This citizen visioning project demonstrated how citizen engagement can bring  a small town community together to generate impactful recommendations, whilst building community infrastructure needed to support implementation.

This case study sets out the approach, insights and lessons for policymakers considering similar programmes.

Objectives

This community engagement set out to:

Engage with a cross-section of the community reflecting the diversity of the town,

Generate a vision and community action plan to inform a range of climate and well-being policies and processes, including:

and lastly, to work collaboratively between the District Council and Town Council, bringing in other relevant local and regional partners to support the delivery and planning for implementation of action recommendations.

Approach and Methodology

Engagement Methods – Community and youth outreach

We took a multi-method approach to recruitment and outreach, combining wider- reaching community engagement and more specific youth engagement. The aim was to develop awareness of the citizen visioning opportunity and increase response rates to the Sortition Foundation invitations. It also captured a broad understanding of what members of the public valued most about Coleford. 

We held community outreach in locations people frequently visit;  the local Co-op, the library and the ‘The Main Place’ – a central community hub in the town. By using pop-up stands at these locations and The Festival of Transport, we invited the public to share what they liked best about the town. Using a large map and post-it notes, people easily contribute their thoughts within these quick, informal interactions.  Council officers were also on hand to answer questions and share the broader context of the visioning project.

To reach specific demographics, we held structured community outreach sessions with exercise referral groups and young people at a local secondary school and youth group. In these facilitated sessions, participants explored what people value most about the place they call home – and their hopes for the future of the town.

This extensive outreach helped the Councils to understand what truly matters to the people of Coleford. Directly informing the topics explored during the citizen visioning sessions, as findings from this wider outreach were displayed in a ‘gallery’ and two young people shared what they wanted from their future Coleford.

Engagement methods – citizen visioning sessions

The citizen visioning group came together for five meetings in June and July 2025. All sessions were supported by a team of three facilitators and a participant support person who supported members to explore the issues and captured the outputs of each session.

All members were provided with workbooks to take notes. They fed back that these workbooks were useful as they  included prompts to support them to explore and think about the issues.

In session one, participants had information about the citizen visioning process – what it is about, why it is important, why it is happening now, and how their ideas will feed into the refreshed District Council Climate and Nature Emergency Strategy and Action Plan and the Climate Change Community Engagement Plan. A town councillor also welcomed participants and explained how this work  can support the  Neighbourhood Plan refresh process. Members then spent time reflecting on a place they particularly value in Coleford and what makes Coleford a good place to live –  they used this to generate an asset map of Coleford. 

Having created their own map containing ‘assets’ of what  is important in Coleford to them, in session two they engaged with the ‘gallery’ display from the community and youth engagement. They heard from two young people from the outreach sessions who shared their hopes for the future of the town. Together the group then brainstormed the things they would like to see in a future Coleford that is happy, fair, and response to the challenges of climate change.

In session three  participants engaged with information on each of the three topics;  happiness, fairness, and climate. To help them respond to the calling question ‘How can we create a happy and fair future for Coleford while working together to respond to the challenges of climate change?’.  In each instance they had the chance to reflect and ask questions of the speakers and then they used the information presented to add to their visions and consider action ideas that would respond to the challenges they have heard about for Coleford. In this session participants produced three separate vision statements for each of the topics (happiness, fairness, climate).

In the fourth session the vision statement was refined into one overarching vision. The lead facilitator worked closely with the whole group to ensure that reflected everybody’s views and there was consensus behind the overarching vision. The group then heard about responsibilities for different levels of local authority and considerations around transition to a unitary authority, where a single-tier council handles all local government services for an area. From this they reviewed the long list of action ideas,  and developed criteria to prioritise ideas that will be fitting with the district and town councils and their areas of influence.  The group prioritised nine action ideas to work on in the final session together.

In the final session the group developed detailed action ideas, which would breakdown how each idea would be acted upon. Each of the three table groups led on drafting three ideas, which were then rotated so all groups could review them before the original group finalised them. The day concluded with a presentation by participants of their overarching vision and 9 action ideas to over 20 local actors from both levels of council and the wider community.

Inclusive Practices

Participants were selected through sortition to broadly reflect the local population across age, gender, disability, ethnicity, housing tenure, and levels of community involvement. There were concerns that, in a small town, the process might repeat the usual pattern where the same voices are heard. In practice, the group included many people who don’t usually take part in consultations and reflected a good mix of backgrounds and views.

To support participation, we offered a ‘thank you’ payment for attending all sessions, and covered travel and additional costs such as childcare. This helped reduce financial barriers and made the process more inclusive.

We also onboarded participants by discussing any access needs, physical or otherwise, to support their involvement. Materials were designed with accessibility in mind, using dyslexia-friendly fonts and off-white backgrounds for printed documents and presentations.

In the end, both councils acknowledged that engagement felt  “totally different to any other consultation we have done,” reflecting the impact of sortition, and the accompanying outreach, to gather different voices and the ‘thank you’ payment in broadening who could participate.

Innovations

• Sortition recruitment invites sent to every address and supported by social media to support sign up in a small area. From this we learned you can ensure a diverse enough profile without falling into usual patterns of engagement but sharing the sign up link needs careful management to make sure that only those in the local area are selected to participate.
• Youth outreach participants shared their vision to adults in the main workshops as speakers. This worked well with support for the young people.
• Group future visioning was supported by individual imaginative visioning activities grounded in a meaningful place. Group discussions were interspaced with individual imagination reflections on a place in the town that is special or meaningful to them. We used these places to anchor an exploration of the change that has happened over time in the formation of the place (from geological and biological processes, to funding, and decision making). This was used as a springboard to imagine future possible changes as well as the elements of the town that are valued now. Creative whole group activities supported sharing. This worked well with participants engaging in the imagination activities. One participant liked this less and described the individual visioning as ‘unhelpful moments of mindfulness’.

Key Outcomes

Community Reach

• 19 local residents attended citizen visioning, recruited by sortition to broadly reflect the local population according to key demographic and attitudinal criteria. Participants were also asked about their usual involvement in local community consultation and events to ensure that reach went beyond those who traditionally engage.
• Over 290 local people were engaged through wider- reaching community outreach and youth engagement.

Policy Impact

• All of the recommendations were fed into the revision process of the Council’s Nature and Climate Emergency Strategy and Action Plan. 
• The process outputs as a whole have informed the workplan of the Climate Change Community Programme Advisor and the Climate Change Community Engagement Plan.
• Through the development of the Local Plan, the council has strengthened new-build housing standards to support household renewable energy generation.

Internal impact at both District and Town Councils

• The District Council said “now we have this mandate from residents, we have the impetus to push it (the climate change action plan) forward”. They are also already thinking about how to fund similar work and build on the team understanding of deliberative processes 
• The District Council have realised that they need to take seriously people saying they need to communicate better and it doesn’t matter if they put out lots of communications if people are not seeing them. They reflected that initially they felt quite defensive when they were hearing from participants that the council needed to communicate more, but they then realised this was a genuine need and have reflected and reconsidered the communications platforms used.  They are now reconsidering comms platforms and are reviewing local noticeboard use and have secured a regular local radio slot. Further, the District Council has launched ‘Nature and Climate Action Stories’ – audio recorded interviews and project visits that become both short and long form stories.
• The Town Council are creating a practical skills space centring around intergenerational learning in what was the old St John’s Ambulance building as a result of a recommendation.

Wider impact

The process and its recommendations have significantly influenced partner organisations in the following ways:

• Informing the Forest of Dean Climate Action Partnership’s theory of change
• Influenced Gloucestershire County Council’s Green Skills Strategy
• Building stronger relationships with Severn Trent Water which has included linking up to existing schemes such as delivering free water butts, linking to the Eco-Schools Programme, and adding value to the work of both the District Council and the Water Authority such as attending events and cross promotion of relevant schemes.