You should call a meeting either in public or at someone’s home to form a steering group of willing volunteers. A steering group is a group of keen individuals who get together to plan the way forward. You could use the local community hall or library for a public meeting venue. It is important that the venue location is easy to travel to. A guest speaker could be invited along to assist with ideas for your local site if it is a site based project. Alternatively you could arrange to meet in the local pub.
You can advertise the meeting by word of mouth, by delivering leaflets to houses, and by putting up posters in shops, libraries, community centres, sports and leisure complexes, and public buildings. You could also write to key organisations you think may be interested. Even if they cannot attend your meeting it is important to keep them informed of your progress. They will be able to offer valuable advice and will in turn inform others about your project.
It is important to have an agenda for the meeting. Ideally more than one person should contribute to this but if you are organising a meeting to pull together a steering group then interested individuals will come along to discuss their own ideas for the site. The agenda should be distributed to those attending the meeting and should be flexible enough to allow a flow of ideas. At the end of the meeting ask those who are interested in getting involved in the green space project to stay behind so that you can list their name and address. These are the people to invite to a smaller steering group meeting.
