Hello everyone
It’s bank holiday time and the weather is good. So apologies if this week’s edition appears to be a little rushed – that’s because it is…. 😉
But we have lots of good news stories for you this week, so let’s get to business:
- Grant Application: Great News, we’ve been awarded just over £7,000!
- Earlier this month, I mentioned that we applied for a grant to cover some of our activities over the next 6 months.
- Well, I’m very pleased to announce that our application was successful and we have been awarded a total of £7,060, a bit less than we applied for.
- However, the core activities of funding a consultant to support the Steering Group and to devise and run a series of community consultations events was approved
- We submitted a cheeky request for £800 to fund the sourcing & recruitment of further consultants but Locality, quite rightly, said we need to do this ourselves.
- The next step is to recruit the consultant to help us run the community consultations. Which leads me on to…
- Rural Community Action Nottinghamshire (RCAN)
- We have held a couple of exploratory talks with RCAN regarding this consultation work as we were advised they have excellent experience in this field.
- We met with RCAN’s Jenny Kirkwood who explained that they have supported a number of Neighbourhood teams in the county, including Radcliffe-On-Trent.
- They specialise in working with communities (the clue, I suppose, is in their name) and we are convinced Jenny is the right person to help us with this activity. We submitted RCAN’s quote to Locality and they agreed.
- We will meet Jenny in the next week or so to set up a formal contract and start planning her workload over the next 6 months.
- You can find more information about RCAN by clicking on this link
- D2N2 meeting
- As reported last week, we met with the Chief Executive, David Ralph, when he kindly agreed to join us for a coffee in Costa Chilwell.
- This was an introductory meeting which lasted well over the allotted time of an hour. David was clearly very interested in our group and pledged to support us going forward. He will help us seek further funding and acknowledged we face a huge task in developing our Plan. He is keen to ensure we get the specialist support we’ll need when it comes to drafting our Plan and making it watertight.
- The key message we took away from the meeting was that we mustn’t underestimate the importance the Forum can play in shaping the development of our Area. But we need to move reasonably quickly and get our Plan produced in the next 2 or 3 years, before the developers start ‘circling’ around the potential development of both the Barracks and HS2 station and surrounding areas.
- We are due to meet with David again (he is very happy to be our main contact within D2N2) towards the end of September to discuss next steps, in particular to develop our requirements for specialist advice.
- Library display boards: quick feedback
- The Toton library team came back to us and confirmed they are very happy to support the Forum by providing a display board we can use to show maps of our area and to enable members/residents to comment on ideas and provide their own.
- We will be meeting shortly to assess the number of maps and the best layout so expect further information on this by the end of September. The team gave us a contact for the community room next to Inham Nook library so we will be getting in touch with them so see if we can do something similar there.
- We are also planning to approach both Tesco (in Toton) and Sainsbury’s (Chilwell) to see if they can provide us with display board space as well. It is important for members and residents to have the chance provide us with ideas on how to make our area better, given the inevitable changes that are coming our way
And that’s it for this week. As always, please come back to me if you have any comments (good or bad) or if you want more information on any of these topics. I hope you all have a great bank holiday weekend.