Estimated Price

£3,785

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In relation to the identified priorities in the Guidance & Essential criteria what will your idea achieve and who will benefit from your project?

After the recent bout of storms and severe weather we have quickly learned that we are not fully equipped to deal with power cuts. We want to increase our community resilience by providing power (in the form of a generator) and a warm space in our community centre, plus provide torches, hot food and drinks for the community, including housebound residents who cannot be moved to the community centre.

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Please describe what you plan to do and what the money will be used for? (i.e., purchase equipment/resources)

We are seeking funding to develop our community resilience project in order to ensure community safety in the event of poor/extreme weather. We have a very rural, sporadic and isolated ‘greying’ population, with a large 32.7% aged 65+; much greater than the national average of 20.1%. Furthermore, 8.6% of our community aged 55+ live alone (Census 2024) and we are aware that we have a large number of elderly and vulnerable residents.

We are fortunate to have achieved the community asset transfer of the former Pinwherry Primary School in April 2021 and we have since secured the capital funding to refurbish it into our community centre, which opened in June 2024. It is fast becoming the community hub our residents had asked for and provides a much needed resource for our community, which has no other indoor public facilities – no shop, café, pub, restaurant, library etc. However, after the recent bout of storms and severe weather we have quickly learned that we are not fully equipped to deal with power cuts. We want to increase our community resilience by providing power and a warm space in the community centre, plus provide torches, hot food and drinks for the community, including housebound residents who cannot be moved to the community centre.

We are seeking funding for a generator to power The Auld School Community Centre, plus torches, table lamps, phone charging station, long life batteries, large flasks, gas stoves and gas canisters to make the community more resilient to power cuts. and We are also requesting printing and postage costs to print and distribute two editions of our community newsletter to ensure that we maintain direct contact with every household and communicate our new community resilience project. In this way we will be able to reach out to those who do not have internet access, or are housebound. These individuals are also usually the most isolated and vulnerable. This communication stream will also hopefully increase our number of community resilience volunteers and further strengthen our project, negating the need for additional local authority resources in times of high demand.