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About Us
What We Do
Sustainable Community Development
The aim of The CADISPA Trust is to help small rural communities develop their own solutions to the challenges posed by sustainable development and to meet locally identified community needs within the definition of sustainability. Development that is sustainable must address the following three key issues:
- Local Involvement: development options should be identified and approved by the local community and the organisational structure of that community must ensure that all members are kept informed and have the opportunity to contribute to the development debate.
- Environmental Sensitivity: consideration should be given at all stages of any development project to the environmental implications of the project. This might include using environmentally-friendly building materials, renewable energy sources, and disposing of waste in an environmentally sensitive way.
- Economic Sustainability: development projects must be able to ‘stand on their own feet’ once initial funding has been used. This might mean that projects need to incorporate an income stream, to allow the project to function successfully without continued external funding.
CADISPA aims to enable ordinary people, living and working in rural communities, to become as powerful and informed as their professional counterparts in the various regional and developmental authorities are, and for them to be able to work together from a position of understanding and equality. People are central to the identification and prioritisation of their own local agenda, and they must be central to the process of sustainable development.
CADISPA aims to equip, inform and support local people in order to proceed to a successful sustainable future.
Support
Support from CADISPA staff is available to all groups within the CADISPA network. This can take the form of specialist advice on community consultations, fundraising, project management, land issues, business planning and areas of conflict, or it can be a friendly and supportive voice on the end of the phone. The CADISPA website is a key resource for community development groups and will further develop as the project expands.
CADISPA Research Aims
CADISPA aims to investigate all aspects of sustainability and uses Local Agenda 21 as the framework for doing so. We are particularly interested in exploring the linkages between culture, behaviour, economic regeneration and environmental sensitivity.
All research stems from, and is fed back, to the communities with whom we work, in the form of documented reports, Community Planning Studies (CPS) (available in printed and CD-ROM format) and as presentations. The form of the research carried out varies, with the needs of the community groups that we work in partnership with, CPS’s for example, involve an in-depth questionnaire survey designed to seek local feelings and opinions regarding sustainable development options for their community.
International Research
CADISPA has partner organisations in five other European countries. They have developed independently of each other, whilst following similar principles. Valuable lessons can be learned through collaboration with people in other countries, and we hope to provide a direct link to these other projects in the future.