April has been a very busy month for me, as well as the Surrey Community Action team. A lot of my time has been spent preparing a “Snapshot of Rural Surrey” for Surrey County Council, which we pulled together using the 2021 Census data and some community research which gives us a snapshot of rural Surrey (the clue is in the title!). I hope to publish in the next few weeks, but I wanted to thank you in advance, those of you who forwarded the link to our survey to your networks. I was hoping to get a hundred or so responses, but was blown away by the 526 we received. It gave me a lot of data to pore over, but it was a delight to do and will give us some insights on rural Surrey that we can hopefully use to influence how rural communities are supported in the future. Here’s one little fact out of the many that came through from the research (spoiler alert!): Did you know that more than twice as many households in rural Surrey benefit from renewable energy compared to urban Surrey, the South East or England as a whole? The challenge now is to understand why that might be, and that’s part of the next job – understanding what the data is telling us. Of course, carrying out such detailed research is an important endeavour, but also comes with an added bonus – I have a load new facts and figures if I’m ever called to organise a pub quiz….
