OUR SERVICES

Start with the challenge. We’ll help determine what support you need.

Community expertise isn’t a single service or a single stage in the development process.

You might need us to understand a community before a masterplan is fixed. To determine what community infrastructure is actually needed. To test whether a proposed facility could be viable. To strengthen the evidence behind a planning proposition. Or to work with local people towards a model for governance and ownership.

That might mean shaping a community hub or business, rethinking how several proposed facilities could work together, finding a viable new role for an existing building, testing demand before committing capital or helping determine how community investment could work harder.

What Support Looks Like

Community Insight:
01

Trying to understand the community?

We can help you understand the place before decisions are fixed.

Our support can include:

  • Community and stakeholder mapping
  • Local business and organisation mapping
  • Needs and asset analysis
  • Surveys, workshops and community visioning
  • Building relationships with existing communities
  • Connecting existing and future communities
Community Strategy:
02

Deciding what community infrastructure to provide?

We can help determine what is genuinely needed — and what has the potential to work.

Our support can include:

  • Community infrastructure strategy
  • Community-business feasibility
  • Existing asset and building reuse
  • Section 106/CIL investment thinking
  • Identifying gaps and opportunities
  • Shared services and flexible community spaces
Planning & Design:
03

Developing your masterplan or planning proposition?

Give planning authorities more than a promise.

We can help demonstrate not only what community infrastructure is proposed and why it responds to local need, but how it could operate, who might ultimately take responsibility for it and whether the model has a realistic prospect of being viable.

Our support can include:

  • Community evidence and recommendations
  • Masterplanning input
  • Vision and strategy documents
  • Testing assumptions around proposed facilities
  • Spatial and operational advice
  • Community-business planning
  • Evidence to support community commitments through planning

It moves the conversation from community aspiration towards a credible plan for delivery.

Testing & Viability:
04

Not ready to commit to the permanent answer?

Communities evolve as developments grow. You don’t always need to know today exactly what people will need in five or ten years.

We can help test ideas before significant capital is committed.

Our support can include:

  • Demand testing
  • Business planning
  • Operating models
  • Pilots and temporary interventions
  • Meanwhile use
  • Temporary community hubs
  • Testing different combinations of services and activities
TEST BEFORE YOU INVEST

Don’t wait until the building starts to start building community.

Why assume you already know the permanent answer?

One of the challenges of creating a new place is that decisions are often being made today for a community that won’t fully exist for years.

A meanwhile hub can put services, social space and community activity on the ground while a development is still growing.

Depending on the project, Plunkett can help take that from concept into operation — considering the business and service model, fit-out, staffing and management.

That creates a live environment in which to understand:

  • What do people actually use?
  • When do they use it?
  • What combination of services works?
  • What can operate viably?
  • Who becomes involved?
  • What should ultimately move into the permanent space?

Start small. Learn. Adapt. Then invest.

Instead of designing today around assumptions about a community that may not fully exist for another five years, start learning from it as it grows.

Done well, meanwhile use can be the first stage of a permanent community business — building customers, relationships, local participation and potential future ownership before the permanent facility opens.

Ownership & Legacy:
05

Thinking beyond completion?

A community facility only creates lasting value if someone can make it work.

We can help explore:

  • Community ownership
  • Governance and legal structures
  • Community capability building
  • Business and operating models
  • Interfaces with wider stewardship arrangements
  • Long-term community support
Where there is genuine appetite, community involvement can grow over time:

LOCAL INTEREST

PARTICIPATION

CAPABILITY

GOVERNANCE

COMMUNITY
OWNERSHIP

Where there is genuine appetite, community involvement can grow over time:

LOCAL INTEREST

PARTICIPATION

CAPABILITY

GOVERNANCE

COMMUNITY
OWNERSHIP

There is a fundamental difference between:

“We’re providing a community facility.”

and:

“We’re creating the conditions for a community to sustain it.”

Not sure where Plunkett fits?

You don’t need to know which service you need.

Tell us what you’re trying to solve.

We can help identify where community expertise could make the greatest difference — and when to bring it into the process.