Leeds is one of nine councils awarded funding as part of the Local Government Association (LGA) Digital Pathfinders Programme, designed to support councils seeking to innovate and develop pioneering initiatives to advance digital inclusion, digital connectivity, and cyber security. 100% Digital Leeds have been funded to develop a Community-based Model to Increase Digital Inclusion, and run a series of related workshops with five councils selected by LGA. Interested parties can follow our progress on the project Miro board. The completed model will be published and launched in December this year.
Workshop three: Forming and implementing a plan
The third workshop in the series of four broke down stage three of the community-based model. This session built upon work done in the previous workshops – exploring the digital inclusion barriers faced by a particular community, and potential solutions to overcome them – and focused on turning those identified solutions into an action plan.
We were joined by representatives from Coventry, East Riding of Yorkshire, and Plymouth, councils. These partners, alongside West Berkshire and London Borough of Bexley, are working with us to sense-check the model, ensuring the content is useful for Local Authorities with a different geographical or demographic make up to Leeds, and councils at different points in their digital inclusion journey.
Stage three content and feedback
Stage three – forming and implementing a plan – contains the following steps:
- Moving from ideas to actions
- Organising actions in to staged plans
- Practical approaches to implementing stages
The final part of the session shared the development journey of 100% Digital Leeds’s community-based approach to support digital inclusion for improved health participation as a practical case study to bring to life the Community-based Model to Increase Digital Inclusion.
Discussion topics included:
- The role of Local Authorities as enablers rather than deliverers
- Identifying and securing suitable funding to support capacity for digital inclusion, recognising digital as a key enabler
- Making the most of partnerships to maximise resources
- The benefits of bringing digital inclusion partners together as networks
Next steps
The fourth and final workshop will take place in September, and will be on ‘Understanding and measuring success’. Following this, the 100% Digital Leeds team will write up the model as it will appear on the Digital Inclusion Toolkit, and this will be shared with partners for review. A final summative evaluation workshop will take place in November prior to the launch of the final finished model in December.