Led by Christchurch Community Partnership, Christchurch Conversations explore the needs of the community with the community and involve them in planning solutions. It’s about working with organisations that work with communities within the neighbourhood, rather than directly with individuals to identify what the caps are, and how we can work collaboratively to fill them.

The last event included 100 attendees from across 45 diverse organisations across Christchurch, including businesses, the council and smaller voluntary and community sector groups.

There have been two events so far and they usually take place every 2 years.

This is coupled with a neighbourhood crowdfunding ‘Community Soup’ event which happens on alternate years. The model involves a soup supper that raises money for community projects in the neighbourhood. At the event, attendees eat, talk, share resources, enjoy the creative surroundings and vote for which project receives the money at the end of the evening.

Some ways to encourage sharing of information and knowledge at the event included:

• using whiteboards for people to share activity and a report was collated based on feedback from the table host
• a pre-event questionnaire was circulated in advance to identify some of the issues that organisations felt were important to discuss at the event
• communication always comes up as a challenge. We are now using a Teams Channel to feed into, with quarterly get togethers to share information on a topic identified by the participants.