Try our free Sustainability Toolkit
By Katie Fewings • Oct 14th, 2009 • Category: frontpageSustaining the revival of your town
As part of its BIG Lottery funded Towns Alive programme, AMT is now able to provide free access to its Sustainability Toolkit for community groups in every small town in England.
The Sustainability Toolkit is designed to support the forward planning and development needs of community associations and partnerships, town and parish councils and other community organisations that are working to revive and sustain their towns.
The toolkit is a free, diagnostic test which will help you make an objective and holistic assessment of your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses and will then signpost you to resources and training appropriate to your own situation and needs.
This support covers a whole range of needs, from developing a business plan or improving your management of volunteers, to accessing funding.
We are trying to tell as many community groups as possible about the Sustainability Toolkit so if you know of another organisation in your town that would benefit from this support, please pass on the link to this page.
There is a help function within the toolkit that will direct you to technical assistance in completing the diagnostic test.
If you have any queries regarding the Sustainability Toolkit, please get in touch with Hannah Bowden at hannah.bowden@towns.org.uk
Go straight to the Sustainability Toolkit at www.sustainabilitytoolkit.org.uk
Katie Fewings is Katie graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2000 with a BA in Modern Languages (French, Spanish & Portuguese). After a year teaching English in Barcelona, she returned to Sheffield where she joined the NHS and was responsible for coordinating training programmes for GPs and servicing the recruitment of trainee GPs.
Katie honed her organisational skills over nearly four years as PA to the Director of an internationally renowned firm of architects in London before moving to Brighton and taking up the post of Project Manager at the online ethical travel directory, responsibletravel.com. In this role, she organised the annual Responsible Tourism Awards with partners World Travel Market, The Telegraph, Geographical Magazine and BBC World News, and facilitated a programme to develop and support community based tourism with the Washington NGO, Conservation International.
Katie has a strong interest in issues of sustainability and social responsibility, and has set up her own website, Ethical Weddings (www.ethicalweddings.com) to help couples plan the wedding of their dreams without compromising their values. She also co-founded Our Ethical Network in Brighton to give ethically motivated businesses in the city the chance to meet one another, share common problems and explore business opportunities.
Katie is AMT’s Towns-4-Towns Coordinator and in this role will help towns to share knowledge and best practice from their successful initiatives through face-to-face and online networking.
Katie is on maternity leave from 9 November 2009. If you would like to find out more about Towns-4-Towns, please see towns.org.uk/good-practice or contact the Towns Alive Programme Manager, Debbie McGrath at debbie.mcgrath@towns.org.uk
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Market towns have been hard hit by the recession, with unemployment overall rising by a third more than in the nation as a whole. Shop vacancies have increased and empty shops are getting harder to let.