Smartline’s Impact on Cornish Communities
Smartline has been supporting health and wellbeing initiatives and innovations – and Cornwall’s communities are at the heart of this.
Smartline worked with community groups across the county, alongside partners such as Volunteer Cornwall, on a wide range of projects. Innovation isn’t just for businesses, and these projects explored how new approaches and technologies could be used within the wider community to improve health and wellbeing.
To find out more, read Smartline’s article about community engagement projects.
How Smartline’s guided conversations tool helped
A guided conversation is a fact-finding dialogue. It’s a method often used by voluntary and community sector organisations, and is called a “guided conversation” rather than an interview because it’s essential that it’s supportive, inclusive and welcoming. It also needs to identify meaningful outputs, so it needs a framework that’s able to draw out information.
Smartline worked with Cornish digital company MAP to create a guided conversation tool. There was a need for a more visual aspect to these conversations, and a user-led design would improve the experience for both participant and interviewer. The final tool had physical and digital versions to make sure it could be used by everyone.
Volunteer Cornwall used the tool to have detailed conversations with residents about their health and wellbeing. Some common themes emerged from those conversations: residents said they wanted more activities that would bring people together and help people feel they belong. Others wanted to improve their physical health. In response, Volunteer Cornwall supported community members to set up and run various groups and projects.
Here are a few examples of community success stories that came from these conversations.
St Euny Internet Café
During the Covid-19 lockdown, St Euny church wanted to encourage parishioners to access church services online. They also wanted to set up an internet support café to help the local community with basic IT needs. Smartline worked with Switch Community Ltd to recruit and train volunteers in internet safety, device management and teaching skills. St Euny church accessed funding for equipment and an internet connection for internet café.
Today, sessions at the community internet café deal with whatever people need help with. Volunteers manage tasks such as setting up new devices, helping with internet safety and security, setting up email accounts, online banking and shopping, and helping with general domestic IT support.
Penlee Family Project
The Penlee Family Project in Camborne brings people together across all generations, providing company and support for each other. The community members were keen to showcase how the Project had made a positive impact on their lives. With support from Ruth Purdy of MITBER, community members of all ages worked together to learn digital skills around film-making and interviewing.
The Penlee Family Project now has several films that showcase the fantastic work they do to support community health and wellbeing. Residents involved in the film-making have gained superb transferable skills for the future.
Greenspace project
A community in Camborne wanted to create a vibrant community garden on a decaying patch of land. They’d come across many barriers and didn’t know where to start. Smartline helped volunteers set up a formal committee, and supported community members in online bid writing, advertising and project management.
Now, the community has its own beautiful green space. The committee was successful in its funding bid, and the community now manages the garden independently.
Find out more about the Camborne community garden project in our blog.
What happens next?
Karen Spooner from Volunteer Cornwall explains how the whole ethos of the Smartline project was to create self-supporting groups.
A key part of Smartline for me has been ensuring that our communities lead on every initiative. This has helped to ensure that there was real ownership of the work that was undertaken, and has enabled us to create future-proof community groups that will continue as a legacy of Smartline.
From film-making to gardening, Smartline has supported a whole range of community groups to develop new skills and provide fantastic services.