2012 - 2013
An appointed Rep from Local Trust came into our area in 2012/2013 to build interest. People were invited to attend open meetings to learn all about Big Local and what it was.
Over time a core group kept coming back, we decided that there were too many people to be able to properly move forward so we decided to create a partnership - a core group of residents that would steer Big Local towards our future. For more on what we did in the early days please see our Profile.
The Group decided that the name ‘Marks Gate’ Big Local didn’t represent the whole area and so a new name and logo was designed by a local resident Eddie Piper. ‘North Meets South’ (NMS) Big local was born.
We had a budget to do some initial outreach, we hosted a whole range of events, trips and activities for as wide a range of people. For more on these activities and trips held in 2013/2014 see our Profile.
We then became endorsed by Big Local. We created our; Partnership Strucure and Terms of Reference which are our guiding principles and which will lead us forward into the future.
Our Code of Conduct was set up to make sure we all treated one another fairly and agreed to rememeber that North Meets South is One Partnership for One Area -the North Meets South area.
Once we had these in place, we were able to begin our real work!
Profile
This took a long time to get right. We hired someone to audit the whole area and create a profile based on the information they gathered. The trouble was we didn't recognise Marks Gate and didnt feel it was truly representative of the whole of North Meets South area. So we took what had been gathered and spent a long time making changes to make it just right.
First Plan
We also created the begingings of our plan. This was based on all the outreach that we did. Check out our Calender for more details on those events. We looked at all the information we had gathered from you the community which helped us indentify key areas for us to consider investing in. These were:
At Christmas 2015 we invited residents along to see what we had done so far. We had some mulled wine and yummy snacks and a nice and informative time was had by all. Our findings from this event informed our first ever partnership plan.
See our About page for more information on our current partnership plan
