Published: 09 Aug 2018
Community groups across Scotland are today celebrating a £448k cash boost, thanks to money raised by National Lottery players.
A total of 67 groups are sharing in £448,567 from National Lottery Awards for All Scotland, which makes grants from £300 to £10,000 to voluntary and community groups across the country.
The projects cover everything from sport to culture. Here, we take a closer look at just three of the creative projects being funded in this round.
Based in Benderloch near Oban, local community group, Bookends, will use their award of £2,760 to organise a book festival which will take place in September this year. The award will help them put together an outreach programme to engage authors with local schools.
Joy Cameron, Chair, Bookends Festival, said: “This award makes a huge difference to our young but wonderfully diverse festival. Creating an event of this size in a rural area has brought more than books, authors and storytellers to the area but has helped to reduce social isolation and has brought about inter-generational mixing in ways that we never could have imagined.
These projects will benefit communities across Scotland, bringing people together and reaching some of the most marginalised people in our society.- Graham Reid, Creative Scotland
“National Lottery Awards for All Scotland funding has made it possible to bring internationally renowned authors like Jess Smith or Lachlan Munro to support local writers. It also means that our new outreach programme will engage many children from aged three to 18 years old in our exciting celebration of the written and spoken word.”
Arts organisation conFAB will use the funding to work closely with a group of around 30 female asylum seekers and refugees, to document their experience of life in Glasgow through photography.
As part of the project, women from Migrant Voice are working in collaboration with professional photographer Karen Gordon, who works extensively with BME groups, organisations and individuals documenting their work and developing their visual profile and is an expert in the field of community arts and participation. Together, the aim is to create a photographic exhibition that will celebrate the identity of the asylum seeking and refugee communities in Glasgow.
The exhibition will be developed and led by the group. It will include an extensive research period, photography workshops to devise and develop the art works, and an exhibition of the work at Glasgow Women’s Library.
Rachel Jury, Artistic Director of conFAB, said: "We are delighted to receive this support from Awards for All, Big Lottery/Creative Scotland. The support will enable us to provide access to the arts for people who would not otherwise have the opportunity to experience the transformative powers of the creative process.
"The arts play an essential role in physical and emotional health, offering humanity an opportunity and a tool to reflect on, process and understand our experience of the world around us we are very grateful to be able to offer this experience to women from Migrant Voice and the Glasgow Women’s Library."
CIVA will use the funding to deliver a series of interactive opera performances to elderly people in care settings and to consult them on developing their own arts programmes. The project will take place at different locations throughout Glasgow, Stirling, Mull and Edinburgh.
A spokesperson for the event (named healthpitch) said: "healthpitch delivers high quality opera performances involving an entertaining and accessible storyline to those facing difficult times."
"We have taken our opera-based productions to over 35 care facilities across the UK as well as presented them at high-level conferences in the care sector. We are raising the attention for quality arts engagement for the proven benefits to health and wellbeing and directly impacting the lives of the elderly and sick that we perform to."
"This recent funding is crucial to our development and reach of the work we do. We are delighted to have received this grant and to continue to impact the lives of those we perform to"
A National Lottery Awards for All Scotland spokesperson said: “This is National Lottery money reaching into communities across Scotland making a real difference to the people who live there.
“Each of the 67 groups receiving a total of £448,567 today are fantastic examples of the range of projects that this small grants programme can fund. It’s also clear whether it’s bringing families to get fit together in Ayr, introducing young people in Edinburgh to the sport of curling or inspiring children in Oban with the power of the written word, that the smallest amounts of money can make a big difference.”
Graham Reid, Equalities & Diversity Officer at Creative Scotland, said: "We are delighted to be supporting another fantastic range of creative groups, communities and activity through National Lottery Awards for All Scotland. These projects will benefit communities across Scotland, bringing people together and reaching some of the most marginalised people in our society."
