Participation principles sub-group meeting

The Participation Cymru Advisory Panel is hosting an open meeting to discuss the possibility of developing a set of national principles for public engagement for public service providers. This will be held at 2pm on 22 February in WCVA’s head office in Baltic House and with video conferencing to its North Wales office in Rhyl. Although the meeting in Cardiff is now full, there are still places available in Rhyl. It is open to any one within the Public and Third sectors who are interested in this work.

The issue has been raised in Participation Cymru’s current work with public service providers. Whilst Scotland has a set of National Standards for Public Engagement, Wales is lacking in this respect. It is thought that a set of principles rather than standards might be more useful and can be used by individual organisations and partnerships to adapt to their particular situation.

Over the last year a set of standards has been developed for children and young people’s participation by the Participation Unit of Save the Children, which worked in partnership with the Participation Consortium, the Welsh Assembly Government, practitioners and children and young people across Wales. Some members of the Participation Consortium Standards sub-group will be joining us at our meeting to share their experiences of this process.

As varied pieces of work have already been carried out in this field, the purpose of this initial meeting is to collate and evaluate existing material before we begin. If you have any materials that you think are useful to this scoping exercise or if you are interested in coming along, then please contact Zuzana Mrazkova, Participation Cymru’s Administrator, on 029 2043 1725 or zmrazkova@wcva.org.uk. We would appreciate that any materials be submitted by 15 February.