THE first stage of the proposed community takeover of St Mirren is expected to be completed within a fortnight.

An ambitious social enterprise project that would see a Community Interest Company (CIC) purchase a 52% shareholding in the club has been gathering momentum in recent months and is set to become a reality in the next 12 days.

The business model of the CIC, 10,000 Hours, requires at least 300 individual members to pay £10 a month, alongside regular financial contributions on a larger scale from local businesses and community organisations, money which will be used initially to pay off the loans needed to buy out the consortium of directors selling their shareholding in the club.

As of yesterday afternoon, 375 individuals had pledged their support. The new CIC membership will now be asked to formalise their financial commitment at a meeting a week on Thursday, although the deal is unlikely to be completed before August.

“We’ve got two more meetings next week [with supporters] after which it’s going to happen,” Richard Atkinson, the man leading the takeover, told Herald Sport. “The people who have pledged will need to come along and sign on the dotted line and actually constitute this thing.

“There are three elements – the members, the selling consortium and the funders – and it looks like the members’ part will be the first one that’s there. In a couple of weeks it looks like we will be starting things.

“Everyone concerned is focused on the community controlling the football club, as opposed to the alternative of an unknown quantity coming in.”

On the same May day in 2005 that US businessman Malcolm Glazer completed his takeover of Manchester United, a group of disgruntled fans met up in the city for a curry. Across the table they discussed a vague idea to set up a breakaway football club, run as a co-operative, in protest at what they saw as the loss of “their” club. By the end of the night the plan must have sounded fantastic.

Two months after leaving that curry-house, FC United of Manchester played its first match and, despite the fact that they failed to score, the players were carried off the pitch by a sea of jubilant supporters. No one owned the club, no one got paid and everyone involved was a volunteer, from the stewards to the people making the pies spectators bought at half-time. This season, they made it to the second round of the FA Cup.

This club of self-selected volunteers is just one of thousands of small groups, associations and societies who meet week in, week out across the UK, gathering in small communities that are not defined by who lives next door or across the street.

Yet, in 2008, a rash of gloomy newspaper headlines about “lonely Britain” greeted a report commissioned by the BBC from researchers at Sheffield university. “Changing UK” argued that one-quarter of people in Britain were “lonely”, a result of a more “atomised” society. In their bestselling book The Spirit Level (2009), authors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that modern Britons experience “little or no community life.” Conclusions such as these rely too heavily on the indisputable fact that many of us are indeed less connected than previous generations to our neighbourhoods. But this does not mean that people’s sense of community, of belonging, has been lost entirely – it merely comes from many different sources. The members of FC United were not neighbours, yet they formed a vibrant community with a sense of identity and fellowship.

The same goes for a mass of small groups in Britain today, be they bridge clubs, women’s institutes, reading groups, home-schoolers or any number of gatherings dedicated to specialist interests. There are knitters and quilters; doll’s house builders and Dutch rabbit fanciers; fancy rat breeders, fuchsia lovers and devoted restorers of elderly camper vans. In 2008 the National Council for Voluntary Organisations estimated the existence of 900,000 civil society groups.

Yet we hear very little about these groups other than perhaps the noisier political-protest ones. The 2011 national census that is being taken later this month will provide plenty of data that will renew debate about lonely, atomised Britain. Meanwhile, groups of people across the country will be quietly meeting, just as they did the week before. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “If men are to remain civilised or to become civilised, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”

Henry Hemming is the author of ‘Together: How Small Groups Achieve Big Things’ (John Murray)

Market competition is driving David Cameron’s ‘big society’; but it cannot rebuild civil society, says Patrick Diamond

Rebuilding civil society in the wake of the global financial crisis has emerged as one of the most insistent debates in British politics. But allowing it to be framed by the narrow terrain of David Cameron’s “big society” would be a huge mistake. No society can sustain the wellbeing of its citizens by relying on market and state alone. The agenda has to be reclaimed because the issue of how to forge a good society will not go away.

The narrative so far promulgated by the coalition government has failed to convince. For one, the big society appears to connect only tenuously with the electorate: in a recent Mori survey, 57% said the big society was merely an excuse for cutting back public services. This cynicism will be amplified when the scale of cuts in the voluntary sector becomes clear.

It is market-based competition rather than civil society that is in the driving seat: shrinking the size of government, exposing public services to the relentless disciplines of choice and competition, liberating the power of free enterprise. Financial efficiency and value for money – not reinvigorating the ties of community – have become the fundamental drivers of reform in the state. Branded private sector cartels will become the dominant providers in public services, not a flourishing voluntary and community sector.

Neither will the good society be built merely by resurrecting New Labour: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were ruthless exponents of a centralising English state. They espoused the rhetoric of pluralism and reform, devolving power and strengthening the role of voluntary and community sector organisations, but New Labour was astonishingly resistant to the empowerment of actors outside the state machine. The roots of civil society were badly eroded.

The good society concerns the sphere of life that exists beyond the state and beyond the market. It is the civic domain of equity, citizenship and service, which is forged through engagement between citizens. As such, it can be reduced neither to state edict nor the purchasing power of money. And we need a practical agenda to build it.

First, make the welfare state genuinely “affiliative”: reward citizens who help others through “time banks” where individuals receive benefits in kind. An ageing society makes wholly state-funded provision an inadequate response to supporting increasing numbers of elderly people. Second, forge a more balanced and resilient economy by promoting plural and diverse ownership: create the incentives for a new generation of co-operative mutual societies.

Third, increase democratic empowerment, restoring the freedom of local government to set business and property taxes: use participatory budgeting to give people a stake in local priorities. Fourth, encourage local production chains in food distribution and household services, backed by a living wage and a community finance levy invested in credit unions to give every citizen a stake in the financial system.

The purpose of politics must remain the cultivation of civic virtue – the “habits of the heart” that French historian Alexis de Tocqueville argued make life worthwhile.

Full article click here

Author: Michael Ungar, Ph.D. in Nurturing Resilience

I recently spent a few days in Bilbao, Spain, and was amazed to walk on streets full of children. Is there a population explosion in Spain? In the middle-class community where I was staying, I was reassured that the birth rate is below that of most parts of North America and yet the streets vibrate with life. There is no need for long SUV commutes to get the little ones to soccer practice as the children wander from their apartments after school and play in the city squares. There are always adults nearby, often sitting with neighbours drinking coffee, or a glass of wine. What looks like chaos is actually a careful dance by which a community raises its children together.

Why do we love to vacation in places like Bilbao, Paris, Savannah, and San Juan? Traffic controlled roads and pedestrian streets are people friendly. Small shops let us buy the basics as we need them. The small apartments that drape both sides of the narrow streets are havens for an eclectic mix of young professionals, young families, seniors and students.

And yet we keep building ugly mono-use suburbs. We create homes where we cloister and do everything: we have our large screen TVs in rooms big enough to seat 20, and backyards where our children only play with those whose parents drive them to our homes. We romanticize those exotic streetscapes we love to visit, but then build exactly what we and our children DON’T need. Our suburbs not only threaten our social capital (our ability to form trusting, organic, relationships with others), they also put our physical and emotional health at risk. Long commutes, less time with family, all that money we have to earn, then spend, to keep two cars on the road… Have we all lost our minds?

A community’s resilience is its social capital, which includes the physical infrastructure, and culturally embedded patterns of interdependence that keep people connected. As we’ve see in Japan, and as we didn’t see in Haiti, what we build before a crisis makes a big difference to what happens afterwards.

Gated communities make all of us less safe. Poorly funded schools endanger us for generations to come. And building more jails actually makes our society more dangerous. Every study of criminals and crime around the world shows exactly the same results but politicians ignore the facts. When we rip apart the social fabric that keeps us connected, we are all endangered. When we leave people with few choices they are forced into patterns of coping that are maladaptive.

In February, I was in Singapore where I saw public housing projects that ensure every family gets a first house, usually a condominium, at an affordable price. The purchase is subsidized, and the racial and ethnic mix of each public development is carefully balanced to ensure no group is marginalized into a ghetto. One project, the Pinnacle@Duxton, is in Singapore’s financial district and at 50 storeys high, is the tallest public housing project in the world. The towers, I was impressed to see, are connected by grassy terraces at different levels, creating parks in the sky where neighbours have a place to sit outside and meet. These housing developments are actually desirable places to live because they are closer to the city and transportation links. After five years, should people decide to sell their subsidized unit, they have the money to buy what they want, where they want. Plumbers can live next to teachers, bus drivers next to accountants. Too much social engineering? Perhaps…but there are lessons to
be learned from Spain and Singapore about creating safe communities for our children and ourselves.

So what’s gone wrong in North America? Is anyone else curious why almost 1% of Americans are incarcerated at any one time. And how did so many people lose their homes in the last two years? Why, amid so much wealth, do we still see so much poverty? While social capital is a great thing to have, research from Israel shows that it can be destroyed if there is prolonged exposure to violence. As people become more fearful, and incapable of stopping violence, mistrust and frustration grows. People withdraw from one another. Maybe this is what has happened. We’ve inadvertently been designing our cities in ways that are putting our well-being at risk. Our communities have become islands of isolated individuals who stubbornly refuse to admit that we’re all wrong. Our children have stopped playing on the streets, which, like the proverbial canary in the mine, is telling us something important.

Without even a catastrophic event like a nuclear disaster, we are edging our way to creating the post-apocalyptic world we see in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Or so it seems some days. I just don’t see how building more suburbs or knowing that car and truck sales are again healthy is something to celebrate when we could be putting our energy into thinking about future solutions to the very problems that are threatening our well-being. Subjectively, we are not happy. And a lot of that unhappiness has to do with something as simple as how we build our houses, where we build them, and the social policies that influence who our neighbours are.

If we want to live afraid, we can keep building our suburbs and vacationing in the quaint alleys of the world’s most beautiful cities. If we want to live free of fear, and feel the connections of community, let’s embrace a new urbanism and work towards integrated mixed use developments and quality public transit. Detroit needs to send every one of its city councillors to Bilbao. And Regina needs to visit Singapore.

My views aren’t ideological. I could care less about political parties. I prefer research and what it tells us about how to create communities that we have seen work. In most cases, what works is also what we intuitively know is better for us. Increasing community resilience by building in ways that promote social capital make us much better prepared to be resilient when crises, big or small, happen to us and our children. After all, what do we think our children really want? A pretty fenced backyard and endless drives to soccer games played under the watchful eye of a coach, or the freedom to play in a city square and make friends of their own choosing?

Author: Avaaz

Avaaz

New York-based Avaaz has launched huge campaigns on issues including the BSkyB takeover and Bradley Manning.

If you had been on the Strand in London on the day that the high court was considering how to proceed with scores of civil actions against the News of the World for its phone-hacking escapades, you would have seen a peculiar sight. About 30 people were gathered on the steps of the court, the palms of their hands painted red, bearing banners that read: “Murdoch’s men caught red-handed.”

On the same day, outside a Sainsbury’s store in Godalming, Surrey, where the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was holding his weekly constituency surgery, another group of 25 people had gathered. They were leafleting shoppers about the News of the World scandal and calling on the government to delay approval of Rupert Murdoch’s bid to takeover BSkyB until a full public inquiry could be held.

Both events were the work of one of the most successful of a new breed of internet campaigner, in this case a global activism network called Avaaz, which means voice in Urdu and several other languages. It put out an alert to its half a million UK members calling for activists to attend the two stunts, with impressive results.

To get a sense of what Avaaz is and how it operates you have to switch the lens 3,000 miles to a pleasantly light-filled office with great views overlooking Union Square in Manhattan. This is where Avaaz has its headquarters – if an organic network of internet activists can be said to have a headquarters.

Avaaz, formed in 2007, has more than eight million members in 193 countries and can claim to be the largest online activist community in the world. This year alone it has attracted an extra one million members and it is now wholly self-funding with about $20m (£12m) raised so far in online donations.

“We have no ideology per se,” says director Ricken Patel. “Our mission is to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want. Idealists of the world unite!”

A Canadian who holds dual British citizenship, Patel was involved in student activism while at Oxford University studying PPE and later at Harvard. After three years working for aid groups around the world and a stint at the UN, he witnessed the power of the internet as a volunteer for the US liberal campaign MoveOn.org.

What MoveOn tries to do with domestic American politics, Avaaz applies globally. Its weekly meeting of staff, held via a Skype conference call, gives a taste of its ambitions. With the Guardian listening in, several of the 35 Avaaz staffers join the call from their bases in San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico City, Rio, London, Paris, New Delhi and Sydney.

The team cheered when the US staff began by talking about this week’s news that Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks source, had been moved to a new, more lenient, prison. Avaaz had organised an online petition signed by 530,000 members calling on President Barack Obama to “end the torture” of the US soldier.

Next, the Canadian staff talked about an Avaaz campaign to force the Ottowa government to release a report into alleged misuse of G8 funds, while the Delhi staff gave an update on the health of Anna Hazare, an activist they are backing who has been on hunger strike in protest at Indian political corruption.

While most of Avaaz’s projects are initiated by the staff themselves, every few days they survey a random collection of 10,000 members to ask them which campaigns they want to prioritise.

They also monitor constantly online statistics that reveal which campaigns are attracting most interest among members, enabling the membership itself to chose the network’s focus. “Democratic accountability is hard-wired into the way we work. Each campaign is only as successful as the number of people who choose to join it,” Patel says.

The idea of a campaign against the News of the World was received with great enthusiasm by Avaaz’s members, particularly in the UK.

Patel says: “We have long seen Rupert Murdoch as a powerful threat to the health of our democracies through his domination of the media environment. When we polled our members, they were strongly in favour of trying to stop his takeover of BSkyB until a full public inquiry into News Corp could be held.”

Avaaz teamed up with its fellow online lobbying group 38 Degrees to send 60,000 submissions opposing the Murdoch bid to Ofcom.

Late last year, Avaaz members sent 50,000 messages to David Cameron and Hunt calling for a review by the Competition Commission, supported by a petition signed by 400,000 global members. To press home the point, it targeted 10 key constituencies of politicians involved in the bid decision and invested in TV and newspaper adverts arguing against the takeover.

The overall aim, according to Avaaz’s Bristol-based campaign director Alex Wilks, was to get “tens of thousands of citizens signing up, even just for five minutes, so they can express themselves and make a difference”.

But he says it is not enough just to sit back and rely on the internet to do the heavy lifting: “We have also to get into politicians’ faces and make sure they know how many people feel passionately about what they are, or are not, doing.

Surplus land freed up by the redevelopment of Murray Royal Hospital, Perth, could become a community asset, according to one group.

In May 2012, on completion of the new hospital campus, the original Murray Royal will close its doors, marking the end of an era of almost 200 years.

At that time the unused surrounding land and buildings, including the B-listed main hospital and chapel and bowling pavilion, are set to become surplus to NHS Tayside requirements.

“Many people believe the land will be sold to the highest bidder with the possibility of a future private housing development.

“But a working group called the Surplus Land Group, comprising service users, carers, people from the local community, chamber of commerce and community council, have been working over the last two years for the joint purpose of retaining the surplus land and buildings for community benefit,” said a spokesman for the group.

“During the early stages of the Surplus Land Group, a lot of creative thinking and considerable legwork resulted in various suggestions for use of the land, including locally grown food, social businesses, archive and office space, budget accommodation, a historical museum, weddings and ceremonies and arts and craft workshops.

“The group saw opportunities to boost local employment opportunities and training for people moving on from psychiatric services.

“This is a great opportunity for NHS Tayside to buck the historical trend of former psychiatric hospital sites being sold off to the highest bidding developer and to put into practice their new equalities strategy Communities In Control, which promotes wellbeing, inclusion, equality and a sense of mutual ownership by selling at market value to a community development trust (CDT) instead.

“A CDT would ensure that the former NHS asset would be used for community benefit — promoting wellbeing and helping to tackle some of Perth and Kinross’s social problems and health inequalities through enterprise and innovation.”

NHS Tayside is aware of the community interest and project director Dave Charles said, “At Murray Royal the new hospital for adult and older people’s mental health care won’t occupy the whole site so NHS Tayside set up a group representing the local community and users and carers to look at all the options for the remaining land and buildings and to report on these to the board.

“The Surplus Land Group has now been disbanded and a non-NHS group is forming a community development trust which may make an offer for the property in due course.”

Murray Royal Hospital has long been viewed as a treasured and important resource for the people of Perth.

Opened in 1827 at a cost of £20,000 the then new Scottish Royal Asylum was bequeathed by James Murray for the benefit of the people of Perth and surrounding districts.

It appears to be the wish of many locals that the building and surrounding land continues to fulfil that original philanthropic purpose, says the Surplus Land Group.

About The Big Lunch

The Big Lunch is a very simple idea from the Eden Project. The aim is to get as many people as possible across the whole of the UK to have lunch with their neighbours in a simple act of community, freindship and fun. This year it’s happening on Sunday 5th June and a record number of people are expected to take part – why not be one of them?

A Big Lunch can be anything from a few neighbours getting together in the garden or on the street, to a full blown party with food, music and decoration that quite literally stops the traffic.

Since starting in 2009, thousands of Big Lunches have taken place in all kinds of communities across the UK and the best part of a million people get involved each year.

To have fun, to make friends with your neighbours, to share skills and stories…

Check out your photos and stories from the Big Lunches held in 2009 and 2010. Be inspired

Why we started it

The Eden Project started The Big Lunch in the belief that we, as a society, are better equipped to tackle the challenges that we face when we face them together.

Since the event began in 2009, thousands of Big Lunches have taken place in all kinds of communities and the best part of a million people have been involved each year. A record number of people right across the country are expected to take part in 2011.

The thinking behind The Big Lunch

The Big Lunch is based on a belief that the world can be a better place through people working together, with nature, optimism and common sense.
• We know that when people get together, we become more positive and start to sort out some serious stuff.
• By simply having some fun with our neighbours on one day in the summer, we can build new friendships that we can enjoy for the rest of the year.
• The Big Lunch is a chance for neighbours from different generations and backgrounds to hear each other out and share stories, skills and interests. We call this phenomenon ‘human warming’.

Find out about the long tradition of community celebrations on Britain’s streets. Past street parties

Bill Kirkhope

Born: January 23, 1923; Died: March 28, 2011.

BILL Kirkhope, who has died aged 88, was a successful electrical engineer who spent most of his working life abroad. When he came home he was an active nationalist, but also an exceptional community activist and leader.

He was born in Carluke, went to school in the town and started an electrical engineer apprenticeship at the age of 16, before joining the army at 19. It was there he travelled, first to Egypt as part of the Royal Electrical and Mechanic Engineers, based in Alexandria.

He left the army in 1947 and met and married the love of his life, Betty, in 1949. She was his wife for over 50 years before her death in 2000 and they lived in many countries, including Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Yemen and Sri Lanka.

But he loved Scotland and upon his return in 1972, Mr Kirkhope started a life in politics, always supporting the SNP. He spent six years, from 1974 to 1980, as district councillor for Carluke West.

He spent most of his time for the next 20 years in community and voluntary activity.

One of his earliest commitments was the new Clydesdale Housing Association. He chaired the organisation between 1996 and 1999, when they built over 120 homes. He held other positions and showed a genuine and strong commitment to tenant participation, learning and development.

During his period he also chaired Carluke Community Council for 10 years, and was vice chairman, helping to revive the Carluke Gala day celebrations.

As vice chairman of the Association of Local Voluntary Organisations in rural South Lanarkshire he helped support and facilitate the development of the voluntary sector contribution to the economic, social and cultural development of the community.

When a development trust started in Carluke in 1999, he was one of its first directors, helping to pursue environmental projects and contribute to town management and development.

When Care and Repair in South Lanarkshire split from Clydesdale Housing Association, he became secretary from 2003. Its crucial role in providing information and advice on home repairs, improvements and adaptations to elderly and disabled homeowners and private sector tenants was close to his heart.

He did not limit himself to his local area and joined the board of the Legal Services Agency (LSA) in 1992, when he was 69. LSA tackles the unmet legal needs of disadvantage individuals and groups throughout Scotland. He recognised the importance of this work and became its secretary, only giving up this position in 2010 because of his ill health.

As part of his involvement in Clydesdale Housing association he joined the Clydeside Federation of Community Based Housing Associations in 1996, and was a board member when it became EVH – supporting social employers. He was appointed vice chairman in 2005, and chairman in 2009 at the age of 86. He was a softly spoken man but now had to chair conferences of 300 people and direct a business supporting 180 social employers the length and breadth of Scotland.

Unfortunately his health was poor but it didn’t stop him chairing conferences, attending meetings and the opening of new offices with his old friend, the Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, in July 2010. The photograph of that event was at his bedside in hospital in his last week.

The Kirkhopes never had any children but he had many nieces and nephews, some joining them on their foreign jaunts.

He was presented a Social Award from South Lanarkshire Council in 2008 and had a street in Carluke named after him (Kirkhope Place).

Through all this voluntary activity, he made a great friend in Muriel Alcorn. They were good company for each other and were lucky to enjoy so much in common in his later years.

Despite being less mobile he still tried to keep up his interests and even took on a new one last year, the Scottish Community Alliance. In late 2010 he was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer and moved to stay with his niece, Bett, and her family in Livingstone. He still provided wise counsel for those who dropped in and even a few laughs. He will be missed by the many he touched throughout his life and his legacy will live on.

http://www.catrine.org.uk/

Catrine Community Trust are reeling after a sensational couple of weeks when they have received the well deserved recognition of an East Ayrshire Community Planning Award and a total of over £2.0m in three separate funding awards. Firstly, East Ayrshire Council granted the Trust £170,000 towards the balance of the purchase of the former St. Joseph’s Chapel and priest house, enabling the purchase to go ahead in the nick of time under the “Community Right to Buy” legislation. Then Rural Priorities granted a staggering £1,849, 207 towards conservation works to save Catrine Weir and to fund part of the conversion of St. Joseph’s to a community education and visitor interpretation centre. Finally the Climate Challenge Fund granted £50,218 towards the Trust’s Green Grow Catrine Powerdown project.

Chair, George Smith, was full of praise for the assistance given by East Ayrshire Council Restoring Communities staff and said “This is a great example of the partnership working which can show great benefits to the community if people and organisations just co-operate and pull together”

The money arrived like the cavalry just in the nick of time at a make or break point in the Trust’s history. Established as the Catrine Voes Trust in 1994, in 2005 the Trust was reborn as Catrine Community Trust and rejuvenated by an influx of new Directors after the Voes Trust had run out of steam. But six years on a project that was not so much too big to fail but seemed too big and complex to succeed was on the brink of collapse as the pieces of the jigsaw frustratingly continued to elude each other. But when it all came together over the last fortnight it proved that some miracles are not heaven sent but manmade and the hard work of the Trusts’ members, directors, employees and associates along with the sterling support of East Ayrshire Council was recognised at the recent East Ayrshire Community Planning Awards when CCT won the regeneration equivalent of an Oscar.

Linda Pirrie, Vice Chair, commented that “This is a wonderful reward for the dedicated Directors and staff of the Trust after long planning hours, hard work redrafting applications and frustratingly slow progress with funding”.

It will now be full steam ahead for the Trust as it makes its final push for the last of the funding it needs in a Stage 2 bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund this summer. The Trust secured a Stage 1 Pass in August 2009 for £650,000 and was awarded £90,000 to develop its plans to Stage 2. If this final tranche of money can be secured Catrine will become a hive of regeneration activity in 2012.

The 1950 hydroelectric scheme will be brought back into operation for community benefit to provide an income stream thanks to a BIG Lottery “Growing Community Assets” award of £434,000 secured last year, St. Joseph’s will be transformed into a visitor education and interpretation centre, and the Catrine Weir will finally receive long-needed conservation works to stabilise it. This will help to begin to achieve the Trust’s long-term aims – to conserve Catrine’s industrial archaeology heritage for future generations to enjoy, save the Voes which are enjoyed by all who visit them, raise awareness of Catrine’s historic importance, attract visitors and contribute to local employment. Water power, the renewable energy that created Catrine as an 18th century mill town will now kickstart the economic regeneration of 21st century Catrine.

COMMUNITIES ALONG THE CARRON:

In March 2010, the community volunteer group, Communities Along the Carron Association (CATCA) held a public meeting in Falkirk to adopt its constitution and got started with an abundance of energy.   This followed on a 9 month consultancy with C&M Community Consultants LLP, sponsored by the Scottish Government and the European Community, Forth Valley &    Lomond LEADER 2007-2013 Programme, and by Falkirk Council.          

High Priority Goals

To help identify potential projects, the CATCA management committee embarked on a River Carron Study Tour day along the 19.8 miles of the River Carron, starting from the Carron Reservoir and moving through Fankerton, Stoneywood, Dunipace, Denny, Larbert, Camelon, Carronshore, Carron, Steinhousemuir, Bainsford, Langlees, Grangemouth, Bothkennar, Mungal and Skinflats…in order to match up maps and visions with reality.   

Following that, the group held a “pow wow” with various funding agencies to discuss a list of 31 short and long term projects, 15 of them on “high priority” status.  CATCA has begun the process of applying for funding for a website, start up costs, clean ups, feasibility studies, community events and some of the bigger clean up projects along the river and its tributaries.  The long term goal is to ensure that the issues and desires expressed in the 16 community consultations in 2009 are answered in a way that has the long term best interests of the River Carron and its people at heart.  At this time a funded feasibility study is underway and we await final word on large funding to do a professional fly tip clean up along the Carron.  We are also part of the new Falkirk Invasive Species Forum which is seeking funding to clear up the big Japanese Knotweed problem along the river.

First We Clean Up the River…

In 2010, CATCA’s first big initiatives were the April Keep Scotland Beautiful clean ups along the Carron.  In partnership with KSB, Falkirk Council Litter Strategy Team, Community Green Initiative, River Carron  Fisheries Management Group (RCFMG), Church of Jesus Christ of  Latter Day Saints, The Carron Connect Partnership, Forth Estuary Forum, Upper Forth Wild Fowlers Ass’n, CGI, Glenwood TRO and the Criminal Justice Service, clean ups were held in Fankerton, Stoneywood, Dunipace, Denny, Larbert, Grangemouth, Carron, Langlees, Abbotshaugh Community Woodland, Bainsford and Skinflats.  An  estimated 500 bags of litter plus several truckloads of fly tipping metal, household rubbish and commercial rubbish were removed from the paths and from in the water by about 200 volunteers. 

In 2011 we are currently holding the 2nd annual clean up which began mid_march and will end mid-May.  The same groups are involved as last year and the clean ups are going very well, hundreds of bags so far and even the removal of an old bus which was in the Larbert area of the river for 30 years!

River Carron Expo Day

In the Autumn of 2010, CATCA sponsored, along with funding from Falkirk Council’s External Funding Unit (Community Grant Scheme), a “River Carron Expo Day” at the Grangemouth Town Hall.  The event included displays, international speakers and a chance for the public to meet with agencies, experts, knowledgeable volunteers and professionals on such topics as water quality, flood defence, hydro schemes, invasive species, fish ladders, litter and flytipping issues along the Carron.  With over 40 participating agencies and groups, and over 100 attendees, the day was a grand success, leading to many networking successes.

With funding from Awards for All, CATCA now has a website which just launched last week.  Many pages are still in progress but we invite the public to visit us and sign up for updates:  www.catca.org.uk

A full 38-page report with photos on the CAC project is available for viewing by link at the River Regeneration page of Community Green Initiative’s website: www.cgiscotland.org, and the Green Map of the project is also viewable at that site.