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About Us
Who We Are
The CADISPA Trust is an applied research and community development organisation based in Paisley. It is concerned with developing a definition of sustainability which will be of help to people in sparsely populated areas and to the academic community and Agenda 21. In addition, a link exists between the research element of CADISPA and the interpretation of its results through direct community action.
Dr. Geoff Fagan
Dr. Geoff Fagan
Geoff Fagan is a native of Liverpool. He trained as a Educator and Community Worker in the late sixties at Culham College, Oxford and joined the staff of Jordanhill College of Education (that later became the Faculty of Education at the University of Strathclyde) in 1978. In 1986 he joined a small team at Jordanhill to find new ways in which environmentalists, local people and industrialists could be brought together in consensus mode to find sustainable solutions to the problems being faced by people living in the most sparsely populated areas of Scotland. That was the start! Within five years CADISPA had spread across the EU and had been asked to extend its work and to find a way to engage local communities in the processes of their own, community led sustainable development. The rest is history! CADISPA found community groups that were willing to interrogate the notion of sustainability in practice and to let us write and research about the concept through a close partnership with them. There are now over fifty groups in the CADISPA network.
The CADISPA Trust, now independent from the University of Strathclyde, has over fifty community groups in the network all working on sustainable community development 'for themselves - by themselves' whilst the Trust helps and supports them and uses their good offices in working out what a sustainable community might look like.
Geoff has two kids, a partner and a boat.
Rhona Anderson
Rhona Anderson
Rhona has been part of the CADISPA team since 1998. She provides administrative support to the project and to a network of over fifty rural community groups. One of her key roles is to support and strengthen the CADISPA network by sharing of information and encouraging local groups to help each other by identifying similar issues of concern and by exchanging examples of good practice. This is done through a number of pathways including a supportive voice on the end of a telephone, by email, field visits and the organisation of CADISPA activities including 'Gatherings' of the network and smaller local events. Rhona also plays a central role in the research activity.