Blackcraig Community Fund Awards Winter 2022

The Glenkens and District Trust, working in partnership with Foundation Scotland, is delighted to announce a further ten awards made from the Community Fund in its winter round, with a total sum awarded of £126,362.

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The Trustees are always pleased to see applications spanning the full range of the Fund’s strategic priorities but in this round there was a notable concentration of applications focused on providing benefit to the youngest members of our community which felt particularly vital to Trustees as the impact of the cost of living crisis starts to impact on family budgets and opportunities - including £12,966 to support Scottish Childminding Association to recruit, train and support five new childminders in the Glenkens, increasing local childminding provision and early learning and employment options for local families; £1,000 to Crossmichael and Parton Playgroup to hire a minibus once a month for a year, enabling nursery children to get out and explore their local area and natural environment; £350 for Springholm Nursery to buy a laptop to assist with an outdoor education project photographing natural materials and putting them under the microscope; £1,310 for Springholm Parent Council to enable primary children to access ranger-led outdoor education sessions at Loch Ken; and finally £3,026 for Crichton Carbon Centre to promote ‘Biosphere Explorers’ resource packs that will help increase local primary school pupils understanding of climate change, biodiversity and sustainability.

On this crucial issue of climate change, the Trustees were also pleased in this first round of fund where larger and multi-year grants were available, to make an award of £45,000.00 over three years to the Galloway Fisheries Trust, to contribute to a project delivering tree planting around streams in the upper Urr area (pictured above). The project aims to protect waterways from the impact of rising temperatures, enabling habitats to remain viable for instream species through shading, and helping to maintain good water quality, as well as preventing erosion and encouraging biodiversity by helping to connect fragmented landscapes by acting as wildlife corridors. This project builds on the first phase which the fund had also supported.

Once again Trustees were pleased to see that the priorities identified in the Glenkens & District Community Action Plan (CAP) published in 2020 are now starting to come to fruition in the shape of developed projects which are being taken forward by a range of local community organisations.

To enable the Glenkens Community & Arts Trust to continue their leadership role across the CAP they received an award of £25,000.

Congratulations to all the successful applicants.