Community Facility Stakeholder Record Checklist

Write down which organisation actually holds the ground and which body the committee answers to, since long custodianship and ownership are routinely assumed to be the same thing.

A specialist contractor, an insurer and the local authority each ask this early, and a group that cannot answer it stalls at the first serious conversation.

Record what the group actually is in organisational terms, whether a constituted association, a trust, a company, a school body or an informal committee, and note where the founding document is kept.

The founding document usually names who may act for the group, and on community sites it is often in somebody's loft rather than with the minute book.

What form of organisation the group is, and what follows from that, is confirmed with an appropriate adviser and the relevant authority.

Note which named role signs on the group's behalf, and who a contractor or the local authority would reasonably treat as the group's representative on this project.

Projects stall when three people each believe they are the point of contact and each gives an outside party a slightly different answer.

List anybody holding a lease, licence, tenancy, grazing arrangement or right of way over any part of the ground, however historic or informal the arrangement appears.

Whether any of these arrangements limits what may be done here is established by the landowner and confirmed with the local authority.

Record which organisation is said to hold cover for the ground and which role keeps that paperwork, without the committee drawing any conclusion about what the cover includes.

What cover applies to a shared facility, and what a project changes about it, is a question for the insurer or broker.

Note which members hold a trustee or officer role, and treat the duties attached to those roles as something to confirm rather than something the committee describes for itself.

Volunteers frequently accept a title without ever seeing what the title carries, and that surfaces at the least convenient point in a project.

For each group using the facility, record the group name, the person who speaks for it and the role that person holds, so the entry still means something once the person changes.

Registers built around individuals decay silently; registers built around roles can be repaired simply by asking the group who holds that role now.

Note which groups have a constitution, an affiliation or a committee of their own, and which are simply a set of people who meet at the same time and have never formalised anything.

The second kind cannot sign anything or take on an obligation, which changes entirely how the committee should deal with them.

Record how long each group has used the ground in the loosest terms available, since long presence tends to carry assumed rights that nobody ever wrote down.

Assumed entitlement is the most common source of objection when a shared facility changes, and it rarely appears in any agreement or minute.

Note which groups contribute labour, equipment or effort towards keeping the ground, and which simply use it, without turning that record into a judgement about either.

Contribution shapes how groups expect to be treated in a consultation, and most committees know it perfectly well but have never set it down.

Record roughly where each group's members travel from, because a group drawn from the immediate streets and one drawn from a wider area affect the site in quite different ways.

This shapes arrival on foot, where vehicles end up and which of the neighbours notices that a particular group is present at all.

Write down the users nobody speaks for, such as children, casual visitors and people crossing the site, and note how the committee would reach them if it decided to try.

Unrepresented users appear on no register, and their absence is usually noticed only once a decision has already upset them.

Record a route to each stakeholder that does not depend on one individual, such as a group address or a named role, alongside whatever personal contact the committee happens to have.

Personal numbers leave with the person; a role or an organisation address usually survives a change of committee and a change of officers.

Note against every entry when the contact was last confirmed as working, and name the role responsible for checking them again.

A register carrying no dates is trusted long after it stopped being accurate, which does more harm than having no register at all.

Write down where the register physically lives, who else can reach it and what happens to it if the person who maintains it becomes unavailable.

Committee records held in one personal account can be effectively lost as soon as that person stops answering messages.

Note which stakeholder contacts exist only inside one person's phone, personal email or memory, and treat that short list as the first thing worth putting right.

Most community groups have a few of these, and they tend to be discovered only when the person concerned is no longer around to be asked.

Decide and record what happens to the register when the secretary or chair steps down, including who confirms that it was actually handed on rather than assumed to be.

Handovers transfer the folder and not the informal knowledge, so the transfer needs to be a task with a name written against it.

Ask what the group is expected to do about holding contact details for individuals, and confirm that rather than settling it around the committee table.

What a group may hold, share or publish about identifiable individuals is confirmed with the relevant authority and an appropriate adviser.

Sort every stakeholder on the register into those simply told, those actively asked and those whose agreement the group believes it needs, writing the reason beside each entry.

Putting a reason next to the sorting exposes the entries where the committee is guessing, and those are precisely the ones worth checking.

Test any belief that the group can decide something on its own against the founding document, any agreement over the site and what the landowner says, rather than against past practice.

Whether the group holds authority to decide a particular matter is confirmed with the landowner and the local authority.

Note which matters would need the landowner's agreement in writing, and record the request as it was actually made rather than as somebody later remembers it.

Verbal agreement from a landowner has a habit of becoming disputed at exactly the point in a project where it matters most.

Decide the order in which people hear about the project, and note who would be genuinely offended to learn of it second-hand from somebody else.

Being told last is a common and entirely avoidable source of objection, and sequencing it properly asks nothing of the group but a little care.

Write down anything an earlier committee promised to a group, a neighbour or a supporter, including promises the current members know only by hearsay.

Inherited promises resurface during consultation, and being unaware of one is far more damaging than having to renegotiate it openly.

List the bodies the group thinks may have a formal interest in the site, and treat every one of them as something to confirm with that body directly.

Which bodies must be notified or consulted about a shared facility is confirmed with the local authority and the relevant governing body.

Walk the boundary and note which homes, windows and gardens face the ground, and which of them would notice a change most directly.

This is observable on one walk round the edge and is the thing most often missed by a committee that always arrives through the same gate.

Record who shares a boundary, hedge, wall or fence with the site, and whether anybody crosses the ground to reach land of their own.

Responsibility for a shared boundary is frequently unclear, and it is far easier raised before a project touches that boundary than afterwards.

Note factually what has been complained about before and by whom, recording what was said rather than the committee's opinion of the person saying it.

A register that characterises complainants becomes unusable the moment anybody outside the committee reads it, and such records rarely stay private.

Write down who is affected beyond the boundary, such as the households on the street where visitors leave vehicles or premises busy at the same times as the site.

Effects that stop at the fence on a drawing seldom stop at the fence in practice, and the people beyond it have no obvious forum in which to say so.

Note the people who cross or pass the site as part of a routine, such as a school walk, a delivery round or a shortcut used to reach somewhere else.

Routine users of a route object strongly to losing it and are very seldom on anybody's consultation list until they turn up unhappy.

Record who owns or farms the land next to the site and how the group would reach them, since adjoining occupiers are missed more often than any other party.

Adjoining occupiers usually hold practical knowledge of the ground, including water, access and history, that nobody else is able to supply.

List the organisations that have supported this ground previously, and note whether anything was attached to that support which the group thinks still applies.

What conditions attach to earlier support, and whether they still bind this ground, is confirmed with that organisation directly.

Record any plaque, memorial, dedication or naming attached to part of the site, and who would expect to be consulted before it is moved, replaced or removed.

Memorial items carry far more feeling than their size suggests, and disturbing one without asking causes damage locally that outlasts the project.

Note which body the group reports to and what that body asks for, so the project does not quietly create something the group has no way of reporting on.

Reporting obligations shape what records the group needs to keep from the outset, and assembling them retrospectively is painful and incomplete.

Note any suggestion that earlier support restricts what this ground may be used for, and treat it as a matter to put to the organisation that gave it.

Whether a restriction on use still applies to this ground is established by the organisation concerned and confirmed with the local authority.

Record who at each supporting organisation the group actually deals with, and check whether that person is still in post before assuming the relationship exists.

Relationships with organisations are usually relationships with individuals, and they evaporate quietly the moment the individual moves on.

Note any league, association or affiliation the site is tied to, and list what the group believes it expects so that each point can be put to them.

What an affiliation or governing body requires of a facility is stated by that body and confirmed with them, never settled by a committee.

If a school uses or hosts the ground, record who at the school holds the arrangement, who deputises for them and how access differs in term time and out of it.

School arrangements usually sit with one member of staff, and the ground becomes unreachable whenever that person is not on site.

Note which local authority departments the group has already dealt with, what each of them holds and any reference or case name they used.

Community groups routinely explain a site from the beginning again because nobody recorded which department had already been told what.

Record which governing body covers each activity taking place on the ground and note what each of them publishes, without treating the committee's reading of it as settled.

What a governing body requires of a facility is confirmed with that body, and its guidance is interpreted by a specialist contractor.

Note any body that has previously asked the group for something about this site, what was asked and whether it was ever actually answered.

An unanswered request from an authority tends to resurface at exactly the point where the group most needs that authority to be helpful.

Record the address and named role each organisation writes to, since correspondence sent to a former officer's home is a common and very quiet failure.

Groups usually discover this when something important was posted, arrived somewhere sensible-looking and was answered by nobody.

Ask each organisation what its own internal steps are before it can respond to a group like yours, and record their answer beside that entry in the register.

Knowing that an organisation has an internal process, and who runs it, changes how and when a committee sensibly approaches them.

Keep a dated note of each conversation with a stakeholder, recording who was present, what was said and anything that was promised or ruled out.

Recollections diverge quickly on community projects, and a plain note written at the time settles most of it without anybody having to argue.

Note who wrote each entry and whether the other party ever saw the summary, since a summary nobody else has seen is only one side of a conversation.

A summary the other party has read is far harder to dispute later, and offering it back to them asks very little of anybody.

Record what people said in their own terms rather than in the committee's interpretation of what they probably meant by it.

Interpretation hardens into accepted fact across a handful of meetings, and the original wording is the only real defence against that.

Keep objections and disagreements in the record rather than only the supportive responses, and note plainly where the group has not resolved something.

A record showing nothing but agreement is seldom credible to a professional, to an authority, or to anybody who was actually in the room.

Agree how this log is handed to a designer or contractor once one is appointed, and which parts of it they need rather than passing across the whole file.

A professional will ask what users and neighbours have already said, and a tidy summary saves the group repeating the entire consultation.

Note the stakeholders who have stopped responding, and record what was last put to them rather than treating silence as though it were agreement.

Silence is routinely read as consent and is routinely nothing of the kind, particularly from a body that is simply slow to answer post.