Welcome to the Rural Exchange!
The Rural Exchange is a new platform for people living and working across Scotland's rural and island communities.
Exchange is at its heart.
It's a platform for us to share our research on core themes affecting rural and island communities.
But it's also a space for you to share your views, experiences, and ideas about life in rural and island Scotland. You can do this through surveys targeted on specific themes but also through the "Send us your comments/thoughts" link. This is where you can tell us about issues which are important to you, how service provision affects people locally, and how things are working in communities - including what's going well and what's not!
We want the Rural Exchange to be a place for rural and island communities to voice their opinions. This can help inform our research, providing more nuanced, up-to-date information on rural and island lives to inform policy and practice.
As Jane Atterton, senior lecturer and manager of the Rural Policy Centre at SRUC, says:
"It's really important to us that people know that the time they spend giving us ideas and evidence through the Rural Exchange is worth it as the information will feed directly into our research and policy recommendations, and then to Scottish Government and other policy and practice stakeholders as well."
We will share our thinking on all things rural and islands with you - through news articles, blogs, policy spotlights, and project updates.
Crucially, we aim to build an open access data hub for everyone to use. For instance, our House Prices in Scotland page shares interactive data on house price changes between 2020 -2022. We hope this is a tool for rural and island communities to better understand and advocate for the challenges they face.
So please get in touch! We are excited to build the Rural Exchange with you!
You can hear more about the Rural Exchange from Jane on the SRUC podcast. Alternatively, the transcript is available here.