If you are new to an area, remember: You need local people to trust, like and respect you. This may not be easy: they may have been there a long time and seen community workers and funding programmes come and go, leaving them with the same old problems. You need to give them good reasons to trust you, and that will involve hard work and some very careful listening. Experience is always very useful, but even if you’re new to this kind of work, there are things you can do that will help make success much more likely.

There’s a fair chance that your initial work in planning a project (as in Part 2.1) will have helped make links with one or more local community groups. But if you are serious about the idea of ‘Environments for All’, then you also need to make plans to involve as much of the local community as you can, or at least make sure that everyone has the opportunity to join your work.