Community Engagement: Getting your community to turn up

How do you get your community to show up — and stay engaged? Join School for Social Entrepreneurs on Thursday 24 April at 11:30am for a free online session with Paulette Singer, co-founder of Our Yard at Clitterhouse Farm. She’ll share how one conversation sparked a movement that raised £100k and built a thriving community hub in North West London.

Join us for a powerful and practical session led by Paulette Singer, co-founder and director of Our Yard at Clitterhouse Farm — a thriving community business in North West London, built on listening, action, and deep-rooted local relationships.

In this session, Paulette will share her journey from concerned resident to community organiser, and how one conversation changed the course of her life. Drawing on her experience founding Clitterhouse Farm Project, she’ll take you behind the scenes of their community engagement story — from grassroots organising and active consultations (the real kind!) to raising £100k through crowdfunding, all while navigating one of Europe’s biggest regeneration schemes.

You’ll come away with:

• Insight into how to start (and sustain) meaningful community engagement
• Tools and methods rooted in Community Organising and Asset-Based Community Development
• Real-life examples of what works — and what to avoid — when trying to get your community to show up and stay involved
• Inspiration to see listening not just as a tactic, but as the heart of community building

Whether you're just getting started or looking to deepen your connections, this session will offer fresh ideas and grounded experience from someone who's done the work — and is still doing it.

About the session

Paulette will share the story of her personal journey — from someone who cared deeply about her community to someone who took action to make change happen. It all began with a single conversation with a Community Organiser, and one simple question that changed the course of her life. Dramatic, yes — but entirely true.

She will explain how the founding team at Clitterhouse Farm began their community engagement work, and the challenges they faced operating within the context of a heritage site at risk from one of the largest redevelopment schemes in Europe.

Paulette will explore the importance of listening as a foundational practice, drawing on community organising methods that have shaped her work. She will also cover other key approaches used at the farm — from focus groups to her favourite method, ‘active consultations’ (the real kind, not the developer-led kind).

A high point in the Clitterhouse Farm journey came in 2018, when the team successfully crowdfunded £100,000 to build a larger community café — a powerful signal that their engagement had worked and that the community was truly behind the vision.

The session will also touch on the present-day reality: how the team continues to engage the community as an established social enterprise, and the new challenges that come with building partnerships with developers and local authorities.

This talk will offer attendees a practical insight into ‘listening’ — the community organising way — and how it can shape meaningful and lasting community engagement. It will show how deep listening helped turn a dream into a working example of Asset-Based Community Development.

About Paulette

Paulette is co-founder and director of Our Yard at Clitterhouse Farm. She has a strong background in Community Organising, Art of Hosting and facilitating community led research. An experienced project manager with a background of working in the homeless sector delivering on ESF, Local and Central Government contracts focussed on training, employment, community engagement and participatory hosting practices. Paulette has a keen interest in innovative social businesses and their role within communities to support individual and collective power. After founding Clitterhouse Farm Project Paulette began her community organising training on the West Hendon estate where she experienced first hand the importance of connected communities. She was able to transfer her community organising training over to her work at Clitterhouse Farm and sees the art of ‘listening’ as crucial for community engagement and fundamental to the success of the farm project and indeed the success of every thriving community.

About Our Yard at Clitterhouse Farm

Our Yard’s mission is to build and support resilient and sustainable communities in and around Clitterhouse Farm and Northwest London, and to become an innovative community-led exemplar for embedding social value in regeneration projects. Through the conservation and enhancement of this important heritage asset we aim to provide a thriving and socially-inclusive space within which communities and small businesses can work collectively to respond to social and environmental need, both at the local and national level. We champion and promote the importance of local history, sustainable living, arts and culture and seek to provide opportunities, services, events and facilities that are attractive and financially accessible to all.