Community Grant Scheme Recipients 2020
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This year, 10 projects within Coigach and Assynt have been awarded a total of £31,869 through the Coigach & Assynt Living Landscape Partnership (CALLP) Community Grant Scheme.
Projects benefiting from funding include supporting the repair of stone walls around community gardens, community archive revamp and seaweed surveys.
Over the last four years that the Community Grants Scheme has been running, grants totalling over £103,000 have been awarded across 12 individuals and 26 local organisations. The grants are boosted by in kind contributions, volunteer time, and match funding, giving the projects a combined total worth of over £394,000, allowing these heritage projects to have significant impact.
Boyd Alexander, CALLP Scheme Manager comments:
“The Community Grant Scheme allows CALLP to reach out to local projects that complement and enrich the Scheme and the wider communities and the area’s landscape. It is inspiring to see the range of heritage projects that individuals and groups in our community want to implement, and I’ve been delighted to see the impact that our support has had over the past four years.”
Assynt Field Club, Sounds of Nature Project comments:
“The Community Grant Scheme was a great opportunity for the Field Club to achieve a goal we had been discussing for almost two years but simply didn’t have the funds to accomplish.
Our website is, by necessity, a very visual resource with text about, and images of Assynt’s magnificent wildlife and landscape. Our goal was to record some of the sounds of that wildlife and landscape and make the recordings available on our website. The hope was that this would enable those with visual impairment, or that were perhaps housebound to access a part of the natural world that may have been lost to them.
The benefits of listening to the sounds of our natural world are well documented. We hope therefore that this project can add not only another dimension to our website but also be of benefit to the wider community.”
The CALLP Community Grants Scheme offers grants to community projects that complement those taking place through the wider Landscape Partnership Scheme and provide benefit to people living within the project area. Grants of up to £5,000 are available to organisations and £1,000 to individuals. Grants are awarded up to a maximum of 75% of the total project cost.
These grants are made possible with thanks to players of the National Lottery through the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Scottish Natural Heritage.
| Applicant | Award | Description |
| Duncan MacColl | £1,000 | Croft livestock moving and handling using mobile systems – purchase a mobile sheep handling system which can be towed behind a vehicle or tractor |
| Elphin, Ledmore & Knockan Community Association Ltd | £5,000 | Making the Elphin Village Hall watertight and repairing damage caused by water leakage to main hall area – ensure the integrity of the hall. |
| High Life Highland | £3,434 | Highland Mammals – citizen science project that provides course that aim to increase awareness, knowledge and recording of mammals with emphasis on the Coigach and Lochbroom area |
| Tim Hamlet | £1,000 | First Aid Provider – Instructor Training to increase the capacity of the community to train first aid providers. |
| John Muir Trust | £3,400 | Quinag Wildlife Project – in partnership with Assynt Field Club to promote interest in the landscape and wildlife of the Quinag Estate and gather all available information on the landscape and wildlife of the Quinag estate into a common digital format |
| Assynt Foundation | £5,000 | Glencanisp Walled Garden Wall repair – A professional repair of a 15m section of a C19 Lime mortared wall surrounding the Glencanisp Walled Garden in Lochinver with training course |
| Loch Inver Rowing Club | £3,105 | Boat equipment capital purchase – ensuring the boat goes back into the water safe to use, then the club can engage as many members of the community as possible |
| Ullapool Sea Savers | £2,930 | Intertidal Seaweed Surveys – Using the Natural History Museum’s Big Seaweed Survey format, and focusing on the five MarClim station locations within the CALLP area, this project will organise USS to conduct 10 surveys per year |
| Assynt Crofters Trust | £2,000 | Assynt Community Archive revamp and relocation to ACT office |
| Assynt Field Club | £5,000 | Sounds of Nature – purchase of sound recording equipment, sound recording training, collection of sound recording of local nature and audio-visual exhibit in Assynt |