The CPAR (Community Participatory Action Research) programme provides community groups in the South East of England with training and mentoring support in order to plan, carry out and use research for the benefit of their community. CPAR resources should be useful for anyone interested in carrying out their own research.

Understanding Scottish Places is an online tool that helps you to better understand and compare the places where you work and live. Just type the name of any town in Scotland into the search bar to get started.

Open Data Scotland acts as a central hub for finding open data from all around Scotland, including in your local area. From here you can find local data relating to everything from more important issues such as air quality management and community council boundaries to the more trivial such as baby first names.

The SIMD is a way of helping understand and find which areas in Scotland are ‘deprived’. It could be useful if you want to understand more about the profile of neighbourhoods in your area and where services could be targeted, or if you need to show data relating to poverty and inequality in your community, such as for a funding application.

Through the Ideas Fund, community groups can apply for Community Grants to work with researchers to explore issues important to them.

Community Knowledge Matters is a network bringing together people interested in community-led research shaping practice & policy change in mental health and wellbeing in the Highlands & Islands and beyond. 

Support is available to help voluntary and community organisations to collect and use statistical data, including from the Royal Statistical Society and the Scottish Government.

These cards are a flexible and creative way to explore whole systems regeneration. They help to plan how to make communities more sustainable by seeing the interconnectedness between all areas of regeneration.

Green Map is an open source platform for mapping community resources, green spaces and any other assets that contribute to making a place more environmentally sustainable. Community groups can use Green Map to create their own map, inviting community members to add spaces, organisations and facilities they feel are important.

Knowledge is Power is a programme to support community-led action research. It provides a toolkit with guides, methods and ideas to support community groups to carry out and use their own research.