Owning Our Future: Community-led recovery and renewal after the Covid-19 pandemic

In 2020, Community Land Scotland was awarded funding from The Emerging Futures Fund managed by The National Lottery Community Fund. The purpose of the Fund was to find out how to help communities move towards recovery and renewal from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, drawing on the creativity evident in communities and across civil society.

Our project, titled Owning Our Future, had the following three objectives:

• To explore how and why community landowners were able to respond effectively to the pandemic;
• To help them work with their communities to imagine their way out of the crisis;
• To use that evidence base to share lessons with communities across Scotland and to influence policy change in support of making more resilient and sustainable communities.

Owning Our Future involved creative facilitators working with five different community landowners from within Community Land Scotland’s membership on a one-to-one basis to meet the project’s overall objectives in two distinctive but inter-related ways. Firstly, by engaging with individuals within the participating communities to get their perspectives on everyday life during the pandemic and on what their communities’ post-pandemic future might look like. Secondly, by producing creative outputs to document and illustrate types of changes that could help realise that future.