News

Fairer Funding Pilot: Projects

February 13, 2025

More than £60 million for pilot projects focusing on essential services and eradicating child poverty.

 

A new Fairer Funding pilot to deliver on the Scottish Government’s top priority of eradicating child poverty will provide additional multi-year funding in the form of 45 grants to organisations across Scotland.

The funding, subject to budget approval, will support projects in areas including health, education, poverty and culture and have a total value of £61.7 million in 2025-26 and £63.2 million in 2026- 27.

News

Shining a light on local stories of change

January 30, 2025

The Scottish Beacon’s mission to empower community-based media
By Rhiannon J Davis, founder of The Scottish Beacon

 

Just like our climate, local news is in crisis. Old models based on commercial advertising are no longer viable in today’s digital age. News publishers compete with sophisticated algorithms for the attention of their audiences. Polarising rhetoric dominates the conversation, driving wedges into communities. ‘News deserts’ expand as local titles dissolve or get swallowed up by media conglomerates. All but one of Scotland’s national newspapers are owned by companies based in other countries. The gulf between the people who produce the news and those who consume it is growing.

Yet, journalism remains a cornerstone of democracy. Locally produced, public-interest journalism is more vital than ever. Across Scotland, independent, community-based media outlets serve as beacons of hope – run by people who are deeply invested in the stories they tell.

The Birth of The Scottish Beacon

In response to these challenges, we launched The Scottish Beacon in 2023 – a collaborative network of 24 independent, community-driven local news publishers. No two outlets are alike. Some operate as for-profits, others as non profits or sole traders. Some are digital-only, while others maintain print editions. They cover everything from small villages to major cities. What unites them is a shared commitment to impact and community engagement rather than profit.

Our mission is twofold:

  1. Strengthening independent local media – Through collective ad sales, funding partnerships, and collaborative reporting projects, The Beacon helps sustain and amplify its member organisations.
  2. Amplifying community storiesThe Beacon serves as both a network and a platform, elevating stories from across Scotland, facilitating collaborative journalism, and fostering cross-community learning.

Collaborative Reporting: The Green Transition

Since launching, we’ve led several collaborative reporting projects including about the loss of community spaces, increased food bank use and the visitor levy. Ahead of the last General Election, we asked our readers to tell us which issues mattered most. The results were clear: climate change and green energy topped the list. It became evident that the green transition needed to be at the heart of our reporting.

These findings led us to partner with the Local Storytelling Exchange, a non profit dedicated to uncovering and sharing stories of the green transition across the UK,  for 100 Days of the Green Transition: a project exploring community-driven climate action from September to November last year.

Insights from the Field

Local Storytelling Exchange Scotland Lead, Clare Harris, reflects on the experience:

“Working with the Beacon members – everywhere from the Glenkens in Dumfries and Galloway to north Lewis – has been a brilliant insight into the range and diversity of independent news publications, as well as how important they are to represent and report on communities.

“It’s fair to say that there’s activity happening just about everywhere to help tackle the climate crisis; whether that’s from families ditching the car and cycling to school instead, or groups of local people banding together to grow their own food and nurture green spaces.

“Whether these efforts are led by a concern for the climate, or simply are a way to come together, save money, and improve health – the end result is the same. It’s a sense of getting things done and making lives better for our neighbours.

“That’s not to say that the move towards a more sustainable future doesn’t present challenges. There are major questions in most, if not all the communities represented by Beacon members around how we ensure people are at the heart of our renewables boom, for example. And it is clear that those in power must do a whole lot more to support people who are already working for a better future.”

Stories That Inspire Action

Many standout articles emerged from this partnership. I invite you to take a look through them either here on the Scottish Beacon website, or over on Local Storytelling Exchange’s story map.

Perhaps this piece from Ryan Nicolson writing for the Shetland News sums it up – highlighting ordinary people taking meaningful action in the face of government inaction. It’s a testament to the power of local journalism in amplifying voices that might otherwise go unheard.

By continuing to spotlight these stories, we hope to inspire more people to take action in their own communities. After all, real change often begins at the local level.

News

Scottish Government to continue PVG fee waiver for volunteers

January 28, 2025

The Scottish Government will continue to provide free Disclosure Scotland Protecting Vulnerable Group (PVG) scheme membership to volunteers following a public consultation on fee waivers and discounts in 2024.

 

As well as retaining the fee waiver for qualifying voluntary organisations, fees for the new Level 1 and Level 2 disclosure products will remain at their broadly equivalent levels in 2025.

Read more at Disclosure Scotland

News

A Blog on Bridging the Gap: A View from Scotland

January 23, 2025

In the UK, food produced using organic methods often costs more than food produced using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Bridging the Gap, led by Sustain, Growing Communities, and Alexandra Rose Charity, alongside national partners Food Sense Wales, Nourish NI and Nourish Scotland, seeks to address this by developing financial mechanisms to make climate and nature friendly food more accessible to people on low incomes. Bridging the Gap is running pilot projects across the UK with the aim of testing ways to address barriers to access and influencing future government policy.

 

Before looking at how Bridging the Gap is working in Scotland, it’s worth understanding a little more about the work happening within and around Scottish Government that provides opportunities – and barriers – north of the border.

The Good Food Nation Act (Scotland) 2022 was one of the most eagerly awaited pieces of food policy in recent years.  The Act is a landmark piece of systems-led legislation aimed at ensuring that Scotland’s food system evolves to meet pressing social, environmental, and economic goals. It requires Scottish Government and all local authorities and Health Boards to develop and report on cross-cutting plans to address food system challenges; creates a duty to engage in inclusive consultation; and establishes an independent scrutiny body, the Scottish Food Commission.  Put simply – if done well, it has the power to fundamentally change how we do food in Scotland.

Continue to read the blog by Simon Kenton-Lake, Nourish Scotland for more information on this work.

News

Scotland’s circular economy and waste route map to 2030

December 23, 2024

Sets out an ambitious plan to deliver 11 priority actions that will help maximise progress towards a circular economy.

 

Founded on evidence and collaboration over the past 3 years, this Circular Economy and Waste Route Map is designed to drive progress on three key fronts:

“1. Setting the strategic direction and laying foundations for how we will deliver our system-wide, comprehensive vision for Scotland’s circular economy from now to 2030 – based on Responsible Production, Responsible Consumption, and Maximising Value from Waste and Energy.

2. Setting out priority actions from now to 2030 to accelerate more sustainable use of our resources across the waste hierarchy. We acknowledge the progress we have made against our existing 2025 waste reduction and recycling targets, the areas we have fallen short, and the lessons we can learn as we set out the framework for what comes next.

3. Reducing emissions associated with resources and waste. The Route Map sets out the opportunities we will take to decarbonise the waste sector ahead of the draft Climate Change Plan, to be published in 2025, and our approach to tackling the whole-life climate impact of Scotland’s resource management and waste.”

Read or download Scotland’s circular economy and waste route map to 2030

News

Community benefits from net zero energy developments

December 20, 2024

The Scottish Government has launched a public consultation on Community Benefits from Net Zero Energy Developments, which will be open until 11 April 2025.

 

Through the consultation, Scottish Government want to gather a wide range of views from across communities, industry and public and third sector stakeholders to ensure that their guidance supports sustainable and meaningful outcomes from community benefits.

Throughout the consultation period, the Scottish Government will be undertaking engagement, both in person and online, with key stakeholders and seeking views to help shape the future of this work.

Read the consultation paper and respond to the consultation on the CitizenSpace website.

News

Cabinet Secretary responds to the Pre-budget Scrutiny Report

Many of us were involved in attending and submtiting responses to the recent Budget scrutiny 2025-26: Third-sector funding principles call for views. The Social Justice and Social Security Committee published their report on 13th November, and have since published a response from Shirley-Anne Somerville, Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice.

 

Many of us were involved in attending and submtiting responses to the recent Budget scrutiny 2025-26: Third-sector funding principles call for views.

The Social Justice and Social Security Committee published their report on 13th November, and have since published a response from Shirley-Anne Somerville, Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice.

News

Shifting the dial – 100 Days of the Green Transition

The Scottish Beacon and the Local Storytelling Exchange have reached the end of their joint project – 100 Days of Green Transition.

 

The Scottish Beacon, Scotland’s network of independent and hyperlocal newsrooms, partnered with the Local Storytelling Exchange to shift the dial on how issues relating to the green transition are covered.

Their work together comes on the back of their Citizens Agenda Project, which asked people to define the issues that mattered most to them in the run-up to the General Election. Climate change and green energy were the top two issues that emerged.

Read more at 100 Days of Green Transition.

News

2024 marks 26 years of the SURF Awards celebrating members

2024 marks 26 years of the SURF Awards, showcasing, promoting and sharing the learning from best practice examples of ‘what works’ within Scotland.

 

Each year, the SURF Awards has celebrated some of the most impressive outcomes in tackling physical, social and economic decline in communities throughout the country. This years winners included Nature CIC for Creative Regeneration, DFN Project SEARCH Ninewells for Removing Barriers to Employability, Kirkhope Steading for Housing and Regeneration, Bute Community Forest for Community Led Regeneration and Molendinar’s Flourishing for Improving Scotland’s Places.

Read more at SURF’s news.

News

Traditional Arts and Culture in the Third Sector

We welcome a blog from David Francis, who is soon to be retiring from his role as Director of the Traditional Music Forum for Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland. All the best in your new ventures David, we will miss your insights at the Alliance.

What’s come to be known as ‘the culture sector’ and the Third Sector don’t as a rule have much to do with each other, despite the fact that most cultural organisations are charities and de facto part of the third sector. I’m not sure how I came to get a hold of a copy of Local People Leading, the original statement of the Scottish Community Alliance’s vision. That document had the logos of a plethora of organisations with the words ‘Community’ and ‘Scotland’ in their titles.

 

From health and transport, to woodlands and gardens, from arts to energy, land to housing they represent civil society, that part of life and society that abuts and overlaps the public sector and the markets. In seemed to me that my organisation, TRACS, should stand with them as they explore an approach to ordering the key components of our lives, an approach that seeks to find alternatives to the fiat of public institutions, elected or otherwise, or the vagaries of capitalism.

‘We should be in there,’ I said to my colleague. Here’s why.

Human life in these days often feels fragmented, rootless, atomised. alienation and loss of meaning bar the way to clear ideas about tackling what is arguably the central question of our lives: ‘What is the right or best course of action for all of us in the years ahead?’ A turn to community, what Alastair McIntosh calls the rekindling of community, is seen by many of us as part of the answer to that question.

Community is one of those tricky words, though, like ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’ that we are inclined to put on the positive side of the ledger, but which require some parsing in order that we are not inured to their more negative aspects.

‘Communities of interest’, people connected through the nodes of shared pursuits, are not our focus here, but communities located in the geographical and topographical realities of particular localities. That combination of community and locality is held to be a vital component of what have come to be known as the ‘traditional arts’, our particular concern. Indeed, my colleague and counterpart in Wales, Danny Kilbride of Trac Cymru, once went so far as to write that

The traditional arts are significantly different to other kinds of art.  The difference is in the nature of the source.  The French have a word to describe wine-making. Terroire. It doesn’t translate easily into any other language although the Welsh word ‘cymry’ with its nuances of both community and a shared landscape comes close.  It means the history of the community that makes the wine as well as the geography that sustains the vine.

That notion of a shared condition is at the heart of the idea of community. Indeed the word is derived from the Latin for city walls and denotes all those to be found within that boundary. There can be communities within communities, however, dislocated or relocated groups who find themselves within others’ city walls with varying degrees of welcome, and who cleave to their own identities and the cultural expression of those identities in order to anchor themselves, steadying themselves against hostile currents. I have always been moved by the resilient testimony of the Irish singer from Arranmore, Róise Rua nic Gríanna when, speaking over a hundred years ago of the dances she loved, said, ‘These dances helped to give heart and lift depression from us who were in the midst of strangers.’

Community, then, has both tangible and intangible dimensions, and in the latter has connotations of togetherness that can mask power structures and their resultant tensions. as Valdimar Hafstein and Martin Skrydstrup have noted:

Part of the political attraction of communities lies in their apparent naturalness. Nevertheless, like nations before them, communities need to be made up. Boundaries and distinctions have to be put into place. communities have to be visualised, surveyed and mobilised.

So, when we personify ‘the community’, giving it qualities of identity, imagination, a point of view, we need to be clear about just who we are talking about, who speaks on behalf of the community, whether such people represent a consensus, and from where they derive their authority.

One person who was assigned authority to speak on behalf of others in traditional communities was the shaman. the shaman had the power ‘to go into non-ordinary realms of experience and then come back and integrate them with everyday reality…a good shaman knows everything that is happening in the tribe, has great interpersonal skills, and is often a creative artist.

Writer, Tony McManus goes further, contending that the shaman’s ‘practice goes away beyond the role of “the artist” in modern society, using the skills they have acquired to draw on their perceptions in order to make them available to the community at large. Someone who had a shaman-like quality to their work and who has inspired a lot of my own thinking on community arts was John Fox, founder of Welfare State International who over three years in the early eighties, as he put it,

transformed dull village halls into unrecognisable dream palaces with specifically designed lanterns, illuminated paintings on canvas and strings of bunting. The evening usually lasted four hours or more. In between dances we slipped in themed theatrical episodes using songs, story-telling and street-performance techniques.

 Fox and his team recognised that this form of dancing was a means of turning a disparate group of people into a kind of community in a very short space of time, and may even have a kind of ritual quality, a space where existing relationships might be confirmed or latent tensions might be confronted. What welfare state did was intersperse the dancing with surreal theatrical interludes which brought an additional dimension of experience to the dancing, deliberately challenging but also supporting that community-forming process.

As company member Baz Kershaw said

In other words a relatively conservative social ceremony – barn dancing – was transformed by radical theatre techniques into the experience of community formation.

The shaman has its more grounded counterpart in the bard.

One of the best accounts of the role and function of the bard in modern times is Tom McKean’s ‘Hebridean song-maker: Iain MacNeacail of the Isle of Skye’. as Mckean writes:

The bard baile was an important figure in Gaelic society for centuries and remained so until well after the Second World War.  These unpaid, unofficial poets were the de facto spokesmen and women for their communities; as such they wielded considerable power over their neighbours and public opinion.

Iain MacNeacail, known by his byname of An Sgiobair, the skipper, would spend up to six nights a week in the ceilidh houses, the designated gathering places. He was an integral part of the community, and it was through him that his fellows’ thoughts and feelings could be expressed in song and verse. He had considerable influence to the extent that his satirical barbs were much to be feared, but his authority was conditional. He told Tom McKean, ‘if it’s not to the [right] music…they [the ceilidh-goers] would soon check you on that’, which leads McKean to observe that the bard had to operate to a certain standard and within a certain aesthetic.

This relationship between bard and community has informed a critique of the relationship between the artist and society in the contemporary context. John Lane sees the contemporary artist, ‘glorying in his own genius’, as betraying the primary function of the artist as he sees it, which should be as a servant of the community. That idea of service also finds voice in Hamish Henderson who professed himself increasingly out of joint with

the 19th century concept of the romantic specialist super-creator… in this anxious, despondent, febrile period of late capitalism, artists have become more and more isolated, more and more shut in on themselves… gradually the poet and the community must be threaded together again – and we must start here, where we stand – we can do no other.

Henderson speaks of threading the two together again, of achieving a balance between the artist’s vision and a collective vision, something we have learned to be wary of, as throughout much of the twentieth century, what purported to be the collective will was a mask for highly concentrated power.

For TRACS the area of creative practice that unites collective identity, sense of place and cultural memory is what has come to be called the ‘traditional arts’, the collectively created and re-created expression of the people’s encounter with geographical, historical, psychological and social circumstance, including the processes of settlement, relocation and dislocation.

Artists with a social sensibility and a willingness to put their art at the service of communities are the vital force in this movement, but there is a clear sense of frustration among artists at the moment over the degree to which they feel their contribution to society is valued. Some artists feel that they are disproportionately supported compared to the funds that go to what might be called the arts’ distribution centres (galleries, theatres, venues etc). Moreover, the centres themselves are inequitably distributed both geographically and in terms of art forms.

Community cultural development, although complemented by the existence of distribution centres, is not dependent on them, and is indeed an answer in itself to the lack of equity in arts provision. The Scottish government, in the shape of its recently refreshed cultural strategy, lays down a template for what equitable arts provision might look like, stating that we need to be

exploring new models of community-led and participatory arts activity which will make a positive contribution to the lives of people and communities across Scotland.

 While that is indeed desirable, communities and artists throughout the country can in the meantime get on with the work of bringing local culture and local history into focus, using it to develop individuals’ skills, knowledge and creative powers in order to articulate a community’s sense of itself and its aspirations.

Community cultural development has a role in fostering genuine participation and opening up new ways of doing and knowing. The kind that we are interested in draws together local heritage, the learning required for its creative expression, and the sharing of that creative expression with others, empowering communities to flourish: to enjoy well-being and good health; social capital and social justice; respectful relationships with nature and each other. TRACS, as part of the Scottish Community Alliance, aims to contribute to that vision, and I hope will continue to do so.

Art is a powerful human tool for community transformation.  Since the 1960s, through the community arts movement, contemporary artists have been taking up something of the bardic function by agreeing to lay their skills and insight at the service of the community in which they find themselves. By negotiating the structures of power and influence, forming alliances and keeping negative forces at bay, by deploying diplomatic skills as well as artistic ones, artists can draw on collective memory and the creative resources to hand to help communities to own their own imaginative life, to articulate their sense of themselves to themselves and to the world around them. and by doing so helping to explore answers to that fundamental question I mentioned at the beginning, of how we create a good future.