On Saturday morning at Wester Hailes library an information session for the new Wester Hailes Community Trust was held. David Jacobs, one of our community reporters has written a report on how it went.
A Community session was held to get people together to discuss the Trust and find any local people and residents who wanted to become members. The group discussed how the Trust would allocate and spend money on future projects to help the community.
Local groups and residents held this meeting to work through and practice how the Trust could allocate and distribute funds to a number of hypothetical community projects.
Three discussion groups were set up to discuss how the Trust might operate through three separate sessions.
- Session 1 – To identify and discuss priorities.
- Session 2 – To discuss funding criteria
- Session 3 – To allocate funds to selected projects.
There was lots of lively discussion by the different groups in each session.
In Sessions 3, a sum of £15,000 was given to each group for them to allocate to a range of mock project ‘funding applications’. The total funding ‘requested’ by the projects was £27,000 meaning the groups had to discuss the merits of the different projects and decide which to support. Surprisingly at the end of the session each group had a fairly substantial under spend.
David Jacobs.
