Today I want to talk a little about a community group based in the North West of Kilmarnock. It’s called the North West Kilmarnock, Community Action Plan or NWKCAP for short.
The NWKCAP is entirely volunteer led, with people from all walks of life and a strong focus on community and community driven initiatives. In fact over several months, using surveys and voting events the NWKCAP found out exactly what the community wanted and has begun to act upon it.
The NWKCAP also aims to bring together the four communities in the north west, namely Onthank, Knockinlaw, Altonhill and Longpark. All this growth and development could not be possible without its volunteers who are singularly dedicated to the goals of the NWKCAP and want to impact real change in their local area.
The action plan itself is a five year plan, and as mentioned above was determined through extensive engagement with the community, this includes having approximately 1232 surveys completed (738 of those from the youth of North West Kilmarnock), 25 stakeholder meeting were carried out and as mentioned they had a voting event with 185 registered people in attendance. So you can see that every effort was made to ensure that the NWKCAP was truly the will of the community at large and it embodied those wants and desires for North West Kilmarnock.
Here are just a few of the vision statements published in the action plan book:
“More activities for teenagers”
“A nice, neater, tidier more attractive place to live in”
“Colourful, happy, clean, safe and nice gardens”
“People having pride and respect for their communities”
Those were just a few of the dozens of visions, suggested by the community and published by the NWKCAP as a guide for how to go forward. The priorities for the group are increased facilities, improved services and improved community safety. This involves considerable ongoing interaction with the community which works out perfectly for the NWKCAP because the whole concept is about bringing areas together so that we can all bring about the change we want to see in the local area.
The NWKCAP is about more than just words, they’ve organised a variety of youth drop in events over the past few months as part of their aim to give young people something to do. They also work alongside other groups to rejuvenate the local area, groups like the Branching Out Community Initiative (and you can check out my post about them here) while not directly linked cover a similar area and are also dedicated to the same ideals, doing things such as community clean ups, and litter picks.
So I hope this shines a light on the hard working people involved in the NWKCAP and if you want to find out more check them out on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
First Published on: https://offtherecordblog.org/
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