Creating Excellence Newsletter

Welcome to the Creating Excellence e-newsletter. 

Today it's happy birthday to the new Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) which came into being on 1 December 2008.  After a bit of an absence we have decided to relaunch our e-newsletter on this (hopefully) auspicious day.

Over the next few weeks we will have some special issues of our e-newsletter to get you fully up-to-date with what the HCA means to you.  Starting today we're looking at where the HCA came from, what its mission is and what its presence in the South West will look like?

For answers to these questions just visit our web site here.

So what have we been up to recently?  We are running two main projects at present:

  • The Empowering Communities Partnership is the South West's part of the National Empowerment Partnership, which aims at getting more people involved in and influencing decisions that affect their lives and local communities.  John Skrine is busy leading this partnership, which is funded by CLG.  More information can be found on our web site here.
  • The South West Design Review and Enabling Services now run from our office in Taunton.  Timothy Cantell is in charge of the successful South West Design Review Service.  For more information on this see our web site here.  We are conducting some pilot assignments for the new Design Enabling Service which is initially offering support to some priority places within the region.  A partnership with CABE to provide regional support for the ‘buiding for life' initiative commences from January 2009.  We'll let you know as soon as we have full information about these services.

Keeping True to Our Mission
We have kept our key aims and objectives from our work over the past four years to increase the skills and knowledge of those working towards sustainable communities and our web site is our main communication and information source about knowledge and contacts in the region.  If you have any case studies, or information that you would like to see on our web site please contact alice.west@creatingexcellence.org.uk.

Events South West
Our Events South West database is a good place to look for learning events happening in the world of sustainable communities (see here for events in December).

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