Shaptor:
Winterbourne Fields

Co-creating a sustainable community

Background

Winterbourne Fields is a proposed development of a 1600 home community in Faversham, East Kent on a site allocated within the local plan.

New garden village proposals are extremely controversial in the district of Swale. The team at Shaptor knew the key to success would be in authentic, thorough and effective stakeholder and community engagement and they appointed Silverstone Communications as their partner to lead this strategy.

Solution

We designed, advised on and led a full political and community engagement strategy for Winterbourne Fields, working across Shaptor and their consultancy team.

We listened to stakeholders about their aspirations and concerns for their community. We did this through a series of workshops and interviews with key local figures.
We engaged regularly and consistently with the community, producing regular newsletters, a website and resident forum meetings.

Our stakeholder engagement programme involved working with a broad cross-section of the community, including the parish council, district council, county council and the business community.

Impact

Our approach was credible and authentic. We proved that early and positive engagement with a community and its stakeholders is much more effective than a deciding, announcing and then defending approach.

Shaptor have taken on views of the public through various consultations events and have reviewed their feedback so they can improve the proposals for Winterbourne Fields before they seek full planning permission.

The Winterbourne Fields team listened, engaged and learned from their community engagement programme and as a result improved their scheme.

“Silverstone Communications collaborative style is effective and a pleasure to deal with.”