Welcome to East Stoke Update and the first News Letter from the Community Plan Steering Committee.   We hope to produce the News Letter regularly, informing the residents of East Stoke of our progress and what we hope to bring to community.

At the recent public meeting it was suggested that ?Parish Plan? implied that it was something owned by the Parish Council and put people off. The steering committee felt that the name should reflect something of what we would hope to achieve over a period of time and the involvement of the whole community within East Stoke. It is worth pointing out that the Steering Committee has only one member who is also a member of the Parish Council.

The public meeting was held on 20^th May in the village hall in spite of our efforts to try to publicise the event and encourage people to come along it was rather poorly attended. This was a little disappointing but we feel that it is hopefully that we didn?t get our message across in a timely manner rather than total apathy. The community spirit has been demonstrated many times in the past within East Stoke with recent examples being the Golden Jubilee parties. The embers are there they just need fanning to create the flames!

The public meeting consisted of two presentations. The first was from Roz Cartwright Purbeck District Council which put the Parish Plan into context with community planning at the higher level. The second was from Barry Quinn the Chairman of the Steering Committee which gave the overview of the background to, and development of, the East Stoke Parish (now Community) Plan. This culminated in the issues we believe we should examine and what we want to achieve and by when. Roz also posed a series of questions to stimulate discussion on what had changed within East Stoke and what was missed from the past.

Following on from the public meeting we have established 3/4 embryonic Working Groups to look at topics and issues. These Working Groups and indicative topics are:

• Heritage and Historical ? Lady Sara Grayson

• Environmental ? Pete Burden

• Social and Infrastructure - Janet Lickiss and Maureen Quinn

As stated these are only indicative and not exhaustive lists. The names against each Working Group represent the initial volunteers who have offered to help co-ordinate the activities. There is plenty of opportunity for others to become involved, please come forward you can be involved in more than one group if there is a topic that interests you. Is there an area that we have not addressed?

The heritage and historical group would be keen to interview those residents that have lived in East Stoke all or most of their lives to capture historical data and human interest reminiscences. A longer term goal would be to update the ?Short history of East Stoke? published just before World War 2.

We have included a questionnaire with this newsletter, which we hope you will take the time to complete, as the information is very important to us, to succeed we really need your help and views. The questionnaire is intended to provide information to assist the Working Groups in their research activities.

The questionnaire is addressed to households but we would be grateful for an indication of the numbers by age range to be included on the front page. However where there is more than one family group known to live at an address additional copies are provided to better reflect individual views. We have deliberately tried to avoid the intrusive questions

Experience in other parishes show a completion rate of around 50%. Because of the relatively low population in East Stoke we would wish to better this and would aim to collect completed questionnaires within two weeks. By way of an incentive each completed questionnaire will be entered in our prize draw with a chance to win a bottle of Scotch.  However if you do not wish to participate we would be grateful if would let us know and ideally the reason why.  

It is intended to hold an open day event in the Village Hall over a weekend in early October to present some of the early results of the consultation process and to give further opportunity for engagement of the East Stoke community as key stakeholders.