Development Diaries 25th March

How busy are you this week?

For those of us working in the sector it is the end of the financial year which generally means a flurry of paperwork, accounts and finding all of those bits of paper you have filed ‘somewhere safe’ to be able to do year end. For those of us in community organisations it also means for some the end of funding awards. The Climate Challenge Fund is currently coming to an end with the following projects in Highlands and Islands coming to the end of their funding in March 2022.

Lairg Learning Centre - for their project Seasons of Change looking at reducing waste from food to textiles.

Moo Food - with their project Scran not Scraps which inspired zero waste food choices.

The Libertie Project - based in the Crown area of Inverness, the project Freedom Veg helped people including ex-offenders to grow their own food.

Lochaber Environmental Group - with Low Carbon Lochaber which helped residents to reduce their carbon footprint through energy, travel and food.

Arisaig Community Trust - with the Arisaig Eco project reducing waste and promoting sustainable lifestyles.

Appleseed Community Company - operating Appleseed Growing your Future establishing community growing space and composting facilities.

I’m continually inspired by what all of these groups have achieved with their projects and taking their communities on a journey to more sustainable, climate friendly and climate ready Highland. Two groups which over the years have particularly inspired me and I have been able to work with are Lairg Learning Centre and Moo Food.

Lairg Learning Centre

I find Lairg Learning Centre continually inspiring but even more so during the Covid-19 pandemic where they so fantastically pivoted their services to online offering learning classes in everything from sewing to growing to carbon literacy. The graphic below shows just how much work and how far their reach was in 2021.

Moo Food

Moo Food have continually been an inspiration to many groups throughout the Highlands & Islands and further afield. From operating the first Community Fridge in Highland, they even wrote a guide which you can find on their website. To how closely they have worked with the local primary school and their community. Ellie and Lynn have become firm friends of us here at the Hub and we genuinely wish them well in the future.

Everything else this week…

I spoke this week at one of the Venture North Talking Tourism Sessions, these are really worthwhile for any community organisations who are operating a tourism project we know so acutely in Highland the impacts tourism has on our communities. Really interesting guest speakers from Highlands & Islands Enterprise on how they are looking to assist in achieving net zero throughout the region and the impact of the tourism sector. Also speaking were the North West Highlands Geopark on the sustainable destination management plans they have been working on an plans for trails throughout the the area. The focus of the event was “What does net zero and sustainable tourism look like for us?” A lot really good discussion followed on the practical aspects businesses and community enterprises can link together to take climate action. Venture North have more of these events coming up including the next one on retaining and attracting staff, please follow their Business pages for information on more sessions.

We also held some networking sessions this week where we are looking to conclude the mapping work that we have been doing across the region to identify those organisations currently leading on community led climate action and where there might be gaps. Also very pleased to say that we have now awarded all of the seed funding we had available for this financial year with some fantastic projects in the pipeline which we hope to share with you and that could be replicable in other areas.

We’re still interested in hearing from you about how you feel the Hub might work for you in the future so please take our survey, just click on the link below.

It is a busy weekend for us with both Amanda and Bethany out and about helping with community engagement. For Amanda she is off to the Lochcarron Climate Feis and Bethany will be working with Crown Connects on their place based engagement event in Inverness.